Color Psychology
by arenavanera
Summary: Ruby is a neurotic prodigy who thought Beacon would teach her to kill Grimm. Instead, she's dropped into a world of schemes and secrets. Hopefully she'll figure things out before anyone's agenda catches up with her.
1. 1․1 Meeting New People

**Author's Note:**

 **This is an AU fic. Many core parts of the world (such as Aura) will work slightly differently than they do in the series.**

 **Enjoy, and if you like it (or hate it), reviews are appreciated!**

~o~O~o~O~o~

In the cabin of an airship cruising toward Vale, two figures stood out in sharp relief, splotches of color against the institutional grays and browns of the seating area. The yellow one was sitting, arm stretched out, people-watching with a bored expression. The red one was kneeling, scroll plugged into the other's gauntlet, totally absorbed by its screen.

"Yaaaaaang," Ruby whined. "Hold still."

Yang let out a long-suffering groan. "We're on a moving airship, Ruby. This is as still as you're gonna get."

Ruby puffed out her cheeks, looking up from the glowing screen of her scroll to glare at her sister. Yang rolled her eyes but relented, making an effort to keep her arm steady.

Ruby brightened up immediately, grinning and turning her attention back to her screen, tapping away.

"What are you even doing, anyway?" Yang asked, peering over to stare at the tangle of wires connecting Ruby's scroll to Ember Celica. "I thought you said Ember Celica was ready to go yesterday?"

Ruby nodded emphatically. "Mhmm, Mhmm. They were. Don't worry, I wouldn't let you go _anywhere_ if they weren't in tip-top shape. I just wanted to run some diagnostics at altitude, make sure they'll keep working if you need to punch something on top of a mountain some day."

Yang facepalmed with her unoccupied hand.

"Ruby, the cabin is _pressurized_."

"Aha!" Ruby said, sticking up a finger while continuing to type with her other hand. "True but misleading. The cabin is pressurized, but only to about 12 PSI. That's almost 8000 feet above sea level."

Yang groaned again, leaning her head back. "Fine. Sure. But still, we need to have a talk about priorities."

Ruby wrinkled her nose, eyes still glued to her screen. Her pupils reflected a rapidly scrolling wall of text, green on black. "Keeping you safe is priority number one, Yang. Well, maybe not literally, but it's at least in the top ten."

"Ruby."

"Right, right. I know what you're going to say. Even if that _is_ my number one priority, is this the best way to work toward it? It seems like a low-urgency task. But even if it's low-urgency, it's high-saliency, because how often are we up in the air like this? And really, what else would I be doing with the time? Working on something I know to be valuable that I might not be able to do later is better than sitting around trying to dream up the exact optimal course of action, even if..."

" _Ruby..._ " Yang said, her voice taking on a slight edge.

Ruby stopped typing. She looked up from her scroll to see Yang staring down at her, her lilac eyes tinged with just the tiniest hint of crimson.

Yang took a deep breath, closing her eyes. When she opened them, their color was perfectly normal.

"Can I move my arm yet?" she asked, in a patient tone.

Ruby averted her eyes, nodding. "Um, I guess so. All my readings are within safe ranges. I should really check both gauntlets, though, if I'm being thorough..."

Yang leaned over, cupping Ruby's chin and raising the young girl's face until their eyes met. Yang smiled, but she didn't look particularly happy.

"Ruby. If you..."

Yang stopped, mulling something, and started again.

"You're so, _so_ clever Ruby. And it makes me so proud, most of the time. I just wish you wouldn't use that cleverness to lie to yourself."

Yang let go of her little sister's chin, looking around the large open cabin at the milling students. "You want something important to do? Go make some friends."

Yang started plucking the wires out of Ember Celica. Ruby yelped and swatted her hand away, doing it herself with significantly more care.

"People come from all over to go to Beacon," Yang continued, not missing a beat. "You aren't the only one who doesn't know anybody. It's going to be really easy to meet people these next few days, and god knows you need the help. Urgency, saliency, whatever you want to call it, it's obvious you should be talking to people right now."

Ruby chewed on her lower lip as she coiled the wires one by one, tucking them into the cargo pockets on her skirt. A dozen objections leaped to mind, but Yang was right. Like she said, it was obviously the right thing to do. Ruby pushed the objections down, feeling a tight ball of anxiety grow in her stomach as she began to realize that she was actually going to have to talk to people.

"C'moooooooon" Yang said, clapping Ruby on the back hard enough to elicit a soft "Oof". "How bad can it be? Look, there's a bunch of other wallflowers sitting around waiting for someone to talk to them. Why don't you pick one and go say hello?"

Ruby sighed. She reluctantly glanced around the room, keeping her gaze low to avoid any accidental eye contact.

~o~O~o~O~o~

The cabin of the airship was surprisingly spacious. There were metal seats bolted to the ground in clusters, but while a few students were still lounging, most had gotten up after takeoff and were mingling near the large windows.

Ruby's eyes caught on a beautiful metal case. It had a lustrous white hue, as if the entire case were made of polished silver, and the front was engraved with a magnificently intricate snowflake. It was lying flat on a chair beside its owner, who was casually resting a hand on it as she swiped through her scroll with the other.

Nobody enrolling at Beacon was going to let their weapon be packed into the cargo area, but apparently some were more discreet than others. Ruby found herself wondering what could be inside the case. It was long and narrow, but with mechashift weaponry being what it was, that didn't mean much.

Ruby looked up at its owner's face. The girl had delicate features set into remarkably pale skin, marred by an ugly gash over her left eye. Ruby almost cringed to see it, but more than anything she was curious. Scars that could survive the normalizing effects of aura were rare; the wound had to be part of the girl's self-image. Either she'd acquired it when she was very young, or it was important to her for some reason. Either way, there had to be an interesting story behind it.

Ruby breathed in and out again. Maybe going to talk to her wouldn't be so bad. She could ask to see her weapon, people were usually proud to show those off.

Suddenly, the girl's eyes flicked up from her scroll, locking on to Ruby's. Ruby froze for a moment, realizing that she'd been staring. After a long second, Ruby smiled and stood up, waving awkwardly. The girl stared back, her eyes narrowing by the tiniest fraction, then turned back to her scroll.

Ruby's whole body tensed, her stomach crumpling like a paper ball. She looked away as fast as she could, hand dropping to her side.

Nope, never approaching her in a million years.

Why was this so much harder for her than other people? She'd never managed to figure it out. Yang always told her to relax, but she was pretty sure that was because a relaxed Yang was outgoing and social. A relaxed Ruby would just sit in her seat contentedly reading on her scroll until they landed. If you needed to psych yourself up to interact with people, how in the world were you supposed to relax while doing it?

Ruby noticed, suddenly, that Yang had disappeared from where she'd been sitting. When had that happened? Argh. Yang had developed ditching her into an artform. Ruby spun around, trying to catch her sister before she got too far.

Instead, her head slammed into something hard as she whipped it around. Ruby's aura flared, preventing the damage but not the pain, and she fell backward with an audible "Ow!".

~o~O~o~O~o~

A gloved hand shot out and caught her shoulder before she could lose her balance. Ruby managed to steady herself, her visual cortex finally catching up with reality and parsing what was in front of her.

She found herself looking at a white metal breastplate. Maybe some sort of high-carbon steel? It was certainly hard enough. The metal was a little scratched, which was very strange. Normally aura protected one's clothes and armor.

"Sorry about that," said a friendly voice from above her.

Ruby realized she was spacing out again. The person in front of her was almost a solid foot taller than her, and she had to crane her neck to get a look at his face. He had blue eyes and a goofy mop of blonde hair that hadn't seen a comb in days. He was looking down at her with an apologetic smile, rubbing the back of his head with the hand that wasn't holding her arm.

Which reminded Ruby that his other hand _was_ holding her arm. He looked a little gangly, but he had a firm grip, and it was surprisingly comforting to-

Ruby's brain finally finished chewing over the situation it was in, and decided that the optimal course of action was to speed her heart up about 80 BPM and redirect excess bloodflow to her cheeks.

Stupid brain.

"Are you alright?" he asked, giving her arm a reassuring squeeze. "That was a nasty bump."

What sort of question was that? She was clearly enrolling at Beacon, which meant her aura was activated. Forget crashing into him, she had pretty good odds of surviving the _ship_ crashing.

Or maybe he was asking because she was standing there like a mute blushing idiot? Aaaaargh.

Ruby felt something familiar welling up in the back of her mind, a strange excitement that was also something more. The stress and stimulation and curiosity and excitement and need to just have a goddamn second to _think_ overflowed, washing into her brain, down her spinal cord, through her whole central nervous system. The world around her slowed to a crawl.

Well, at least she had a second to collect herself.

Ruby eased out of the boy's grip, ever so slowly. She didn't want to give him ropeburn. Or would it be shirtburn? Clothburn?

Moving while under the effect of her semblance was always a strange experience. Her muscles couldn't move at these speeds - nobody's could - so her aura ended up moving her limbs by itself, normalizing their position to stay in line with her sped-up proprioception. Air felt like thick soup when she was going this fast, and sound slowed to a deep, continuous drone. Together with the strange weightlessness of her limbs, it felt like drifting through a dreamscape.

Ruby finished extricating herself from the boy's hand. She backed up a step, putting about three feet between them. Or was that too far?

Ruby knew she had social problems. _Problems_ , plural. There were a thousand little things she did wrong, subtleties of timing or distance or tone that just weren't right. If it were one or two big problems, she felt like she could work on them, practice and practice and batter them into submission by sheer repetition. But there were too many to make a dent in, and she never could figure out some general principle that tied them all together.

Like how close to stand to people, for example. It was _complicated_. When Ruby was young, she'd stood right in front of people, the way she would with Yang or her dad. But it turned out you weren't supposed to do that, you were supposed to stand farther away from people you didn't know. It had been one of the first things Yang had had to take her aside and tell her: that she was coming on too strong by getting right in people's face when she met them.

But it wasn't just how well you knew someone, it was a thousand other things. Age mattered - kids could get as close as they wanted, as you got older you were supposed to stand further apart. It wasn't just how well you knew someone, it was the type of relationship. You stood closer to a cousin you'd never met than to a teacher you'd known for years. And there was a gender aspect, some sort of subtle signal she couldn't untangle that seemed to shift every year or two that dictated how close she was supposed to stand to boys in particular.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, people were playing all sorts of _games_ , all the time. Shopkeepers would stand extra close and fake familiar body language to try and make a sale. Sometimes people would stand at the distance for the relationship they wanted, rather than the relationship they had, or sometimes people would stand further away if they were mad.

And then it seemed to vary again by personality. Yang could stand any distance she wanted from people. She made them comfortable somehow. Other people, like uncle Qrow, seemed to have a bubble around them that kept people out. (Or most people, at least; nothing was going to keep Ruby from tackling him.)

Ruby felt a hard thump in her chest, the first heartbeat since her semblance had kicked in. Argh, how long had she been thinking?

That was her other problem. She tended to space out, get lost in her own thoughts and lose track of the moment.

Ruby forcibly pulled herself out of her thoughts. She was feeling less stimulated, now that there was no immediate pressure, which meant her semblance was probably going to fade soon.

She looked over the boy she'd bumped into. He was wearing a strange sort of armor, chestpiece and pauldrons and gauntlets poking out of his gloves. Why would you wear armor that covered your ribcage but not your stomach? If anything it should be the opposite.

Under the armor were casual clothes, a hoodie and jeans that clashed with the faux-martial look. He had a sword sheathed at his waist, the sheathe clearly mechashift, but old, possibly even first-generation. She couldn't see the sword, but as far as she could tell its handle was solid metal, forged or cast rather than machined out of thin layers, the type of weapon that would hold up even without aura reinforcing it.

Ruby felt the world around her starting to speed up, gradually at first, but she knew she only had moments. She hesitated briefly, then took half a step forward, close enough that she could just brush his chest plate with her fingertips if she reached out. She put on a big smile as the world sped up fast and faster, until in a whirring rush she was dumped back into moving, chattering reality.

She was also dumped back into her normal body. She stumbled mentally as she realized her heart was still hammering and her cheeks were still flushed, her physiological state out of whack with the calmer place her mind had been, too far out of sync for her aura to fudge it.

The boy blinked at his empty hand, confused, then looked up at where she was now standing. She clasped his outstretched hand in both of hers, more out of instinct than anything, shaking it vigorously.

"Hi! IIII'm Ruby."

"Um...hi?"

"Oh! Sorry. That was my semblance. It's a little temperamental. Emotional semblances run in my family. No pun intended. Sorry for running into you!"

Her voice came out breathless and squeaky. She was talking too fast.

The boy smiled back at her, though.

"Ah, Right. I'm Jaune! Jaune Arc. Sorry for the bump there, I was just..."

"Nice to meet you Jaune! Can I see your sword?" she interrupted.

"Um..."

"I mean, if it's alright. It's forged, right? I've never seen a real forged sword before."

Ruby dropped his hand and stepped a little closer, bending down to peer at the sword.

"Oooooh, right. My sword. Uh, yeah, sure! Why not?"

Jaune looked around to make sure nobody was nearby, then carefully pulled out the blade. He looked at it himself for a moment, something inscrutable passing over his face, then flipped it around and offered the handle to Ruby.

Ruby snatched it up without a moment's hesitation.

"Woooooooooooooooowww~" she said, turning it over in her hand. It was _heavy_. So inefficient, but _so_ cool...

"It's so shiny!" she said, angling it to catch the light. Ruby gently touched the tip, enjoying the pricking sensation on her finger.

"There's something else on here, too. Did you oil it?"

"Just this morning." Jaune said proudly, puffing out his chest.

Ruby was impressed. People with aura almost never bothered with maintenance. Their image of their weapon would keep it sharp and rust-free, which made it tempting to just skip all the extra work. But if you never maintained your weapon, well, then you wouldn't tend to think of it as being in particularly amazing shape. It would stay functional, but that extra little edge would be gone.

Ruby spent a few hours of quality time with Crescent Rose a week, and she liked to think it showed. It was nice to meet someone else who cared about that kind of thing, even if he did have some anachronistic tendencies.

"Why did you decide to _forge_ your weapon, of all things?" Ruby asked.

"Er...I didn't exactly forge it myself. It belonged to my grandfather. He used it to fight in the war."

"Woooooow!" Ruby said again. "A real heirloom, passed down through generations. And a sword, too. That's drawing on some powerful imagery. I guess the boost to your self-image is worth the loss of flexibility? Unorthodox, but I could see it being a good tradeoff."

Ruby hefted the sword and started swinging it, feeling the balance. It was _heavy_. Jaune took a nervous step back.

"Erm, yeah. Something like that."

"I'm surprised your school let you get away with it. I went to Signal, and they're a real stickler for making everyone design their own weapons. Not that I mind, of course. Weapon design and maintenance was always my favorite subject."

Ruby stopped after a few swings, reasonably satisfied. She tossed it in the air, letting it flip a few times, and caught it deftly by the blade, holding it out to Jaune hilt-first. Etiquette and all that. Jaune took it back and sheathed it, looking considerably relieved. Ruby understood perfectly; she got nervous whenever Crescent Rose was out of her hands, too.

" _Oh_ , I haven't shown you Crescent Rose. Do you want to see?"

Without waiting for an answer, Ruby reached behind her and pulled out her baby. Crescent rose expanded in her hand as Ruby brought him forward, fifty seven individual mechashift components unfolding in perfect synchrony. She wasn't just guessing, she could _feel_ them unfolding in perfect synchrony, her sense of proprioception expanding through the scythe as her aura wrapped around him, the weapon so familiar to her soul that he might as well have been a part of her.

Ruby whipped crescent rose around in front of her and over her shoulder, showing off a little, careful not to let the sharp tip touch the plane's rather nice carpeting. She brought him to rest behind her, held against her back with both hands, blade near the ground and shaft in the air behind her.

"Whoah!" Jaune said, taking another step back.

Was this one of those social cues with space? Was she doing something wrong? He hadn't actually _said_ he wanted to see Crescent Rose. Maybe she should have waited for him to respond?

Wait, this line of thinking was a trap. She was going to space out again.

"You _made_ that?" Jaune asked, mouth open. "That's amazing!"

That made Ruby smile. He really did have an eye for weaponry. All mechashift transformations looked impressive to civilians, but being able to tell Crescent Rose apart from your everyday mechashift weapon just by seeing him unfold _once_ , that took a little bit of taste.

"Yup. Two years of classes, nights, and weekends, right here."

"Only two years?"

Ruby froze. Oh shit. She'd just let him know that she'd been moved ahead two years, hadn't she? What was he going to think?

"Um...yeah." she said, looking down and rubbing her toe against the carpet. "I...kinda-sorta got moved ahead a little. It's not a big deal, though."

Ruby rushed to change the subject, eyes glued to the floor.

"But...but that's boring. You really didn't have to make a weapon in your curriculum? Where did you go to school?"

"Erm..."

Jaune rubbed his hand on the back of his head, eyes flicking to the right.

"I was...sort of homeschooled, actually. It's kind of an odd situation. But, wow, only two years to make that...I'm not sure if I could do that if I spent the rest of my life on it."

Ruby blushed more, digging her toe deeper into the ground. Was he being patronizing? It felt like the tone of the conversation had shifted a little.

At least he was still talking to her. Yang's group of friends treated her like a kid, but then again, they'd known her for a long time. A 10 year old feels a lot older than an 8 year old, but maybe 17 and 15 felt less far apart?

Was she doing that thing Yang always said she did, where she got worked up over nothing?

There was a moment of awkward silence.

Jaune cleared his throat. "Well, anyway, it's nice to meet you, Ruby. Sorry again for bumping into you. I guess I'll let you go, I don't want to hold you up too long if you have somewhere to be..."

"Oh, I don't have anywhere to be." she said, before realizing how lame it sounded. Stupid brain, why would you say that?

"The only person I know here is my sister, and she ditched me." she continued, digging herself deeper.

"Huh. Well, I don't really know anyone either, actually. Maybe we should go pick a few stragglers out of the herd and make some friends?"

Ruby finally looked up, hope blooming in her chest, wildly out of proportion to the mundanity of the situation. Jaune was wearing a goofy grin, not seeming put out by her age or awkwardness in the slightest.

 _Yes please!_ she almost said, barely catching herself. She coughed gently instead. "Um...that sounds fun." she said, just a hair quieter than normal.

"Great!" Jaune said, clapping his hands together. "Should be easy, with such a great conversation starter."

Ruby wondered what he was talking about for a moment, but now that she wasn't looking at the ground, she realized that most of the students and all of the crew members in the cabin were staring at her. Shortly thereafter, she realized that she was standing in the middle of a civilian craft with a seven-foot combat scythe deployed behind her.

Ruby's stomach dropped through the floor, crescent rose collapsing in her hands as her body dug deep for new reserves of blood to send to her face.


	2. 1․2 Precipice

Ruby and Jaune walked down the airship ramp together, chatting amicably. Well, Ruby was doing most of the talking, but Jaune seemed interested.

Ruby wasn't quite skipping, but her feet were thinking about it. She'd made a _friend_ , without Yang's help. Wait, was Jaune a friend? He was certainly acting friendly.

"You've really never heard of the color hypothesis?" Ruby asked.

Jaune straightened his hoodie a little.

"No. Maybe my parents used a different name for it?"

"Oh. That's possible. I can just explain it real quick, it's not very complicated. Well, I guess some versions of it are."

"O...kay?"

"There's basically two parts. Or three, I guess. It's really poorly named, because it's more of a cluster of observations and explanations than a single hypothesis. The first part, which pretty much everyone agrees on, is that color affects people's psychology. Like, bright red is dangerous, pastels are calming, that sort of thing. There was this great study in Atlas where they gave people sugar pills instead of medicine for psychiatric disorders, and sure enough, red sugar pills worked measurably better as stimulants and blue sugar pills worked better as depressants."

They got to the bottom of the ramp and started circling around to the baggage area, Jaune listening intently.

"The second part, which is a little more contentious, is just the observation that people with differently-colored hair tend to have different personalities. I mean, it's not _that_ contentious, because it's obvious as all get-out. People with yellow hair like yours tend to be outgoing, confident, good with people, that sort of thing. People with black hair are more withdrawn, introverted, intellectual. People with red hair tend to stand out somehow. A lot of them become athletes, hunters, things like that; professions that put them in high-stress situations where they can excel."

"Wow."

"It's not like your hair color decides your entire fate, of course. There's plenty of politicians with black hair, and plenty of blonde professors. And it can be hard to disentangle the actual patterns from superstition, especially since the superstitions become self-reinforcing. If all the kids with red hair get put onto sports teams and pushed really hard by their parents, it's easy to see how that would become self-perpetuating."

"What happens if you dye your hair?"

"Great question! That's most of how people have tried to separate the fundamental effects of hair color from the social effects. It turns out dying your hair moves you a little bit in the appropriate direction, but not as far as having that color naturally. It moves you even farther if you chose to dye it. And boy, it gets _really_ complicated when you start getting into mixed colors, or multiple colors. A lot of people in Mistral have black hair, and there's been a trend for the last decade to dye just a small patch of your hair with your favorite color. Makes it pretty hard to study the color hypothesis in Mistral. And it isn't just hair, either. The clothes you wear, your accessories, all of these move people around on the color chart in complicated ways."

"Sounds complicated."

"Yeah, it's crazy complicated. And there's a lot of pseudoscientific bull floating around. You probably wouldn't know if you grew up in the countryside, but in larger towns you can find people who do 'color readings' for you. They look at your hair, your eyes, your skin, the clothes you picked, and then they tell you a bunch of vague stuff about who you are and what you want. Some of them even claim they can tell the future."

"Eesh."

"Yeah, I know, right? But anyway, the third part of the color hypothesis is the most contentious. It's basically the body of speculation around _why_ colors have these effects on people. Some people think it's almost all social reinforcement. Some people think it's a hereditary thing - some early group of humans evolved yellow hair and outgoing personality traits at the same time, and whether or not you have yellow hair is just a marker of how many of your ancestors came from that group. Some people think that it's hereditary, but more direct than that, like the way bear and mouse faunus have different personalities. And some people believe that your colors are an expression of your soul."

"Your soul?"

"Yeah. There's a surprising amount of evidence for that, incidentally. Your aura has a color, first of all. And the normalizing effects of aura are really extreme on color changes. It's way easier to change the kinds of clothes you wear than to change your color scheme. If I were to start wearing white and blue, my aura wouldn't protect the clothes at all. And dying your hair is almost impossible. The dye job has to be important to you in some way, or it fades almost immediately."

Jaune looked over at her, his eyes aimed slightly above her own. What was he - oh. Ruby looked away, suddenly feeling awkward. Her own red highlights were far from a normal dye job, but she didn't really want to bring that up right now. It tended to put people off.

The porters finally got Ruby's luggage off. She had considerably more than most people: a small day bag of personal items, two huge trunks with ammo and parts for Crescent Rose, and a third smaller trunk for Ember Celica. Yang was planning to keep them maintained with the school materials, but Ruby liked to be prepared.

Jaune was already holding his two bags. One was a large camping backpack, the other a small day bag like hers. Ruby hesitated for a moment - should she ask for his help carrying the trunks? She was certainly strong enough, but three trunks was more than a little unwieldy. Yang had helped her get them to the ship, but since she was nowhere to be found-

"Hey sis!"

A hand clapped Ruby on the back, hard enough to knock her off balance a little bit. She stumbled forward half a step, looking over her shoulder at Yang with a peeved expression.

"Yang! Where have you _been_?"

"I was just catching up with the Signal crew. Jess, Annie, some guys you haven't met."

Yang squeezed Ruby's shoulder a bit as she said "some guys you haven't met", stepping forward to stand next to her. Ruby got the hint, for once.

"Great. Er, Jaune, this is my sister Yang. Yang, this is Jaune. I ran into him on the airship."

Jaune's quirked a smile at that. He turned to look at Yang, his eyes going up and down her once, which made Yang smirk. Ruby would've felt a little put out, but this happened _every_ time and she was basically inured to it at this point.

"We noticed." Yang said, stepping forward with her hand out and giving Jaune a wink. "You two made quite the scene."

Ruby blushed, but neither of them were really looking at her. Jaune grasped Yang's hand and shook it. They were making a lot of eye contact, but maybe that's what socially competent people did when they shook hands?

"It wasn't all that bad," Jaune said, holding onto Yang's hand for maybe a second too long before letting go. "It made for a pretty good icebreaker. We ended up spending most of the flight talking to this couple from Mistral. Interesting place, sounds like."

"Oh, I'm sure." Yang said, stepping back and clasping her hands behind her.

"You two both went to Signal, then?" Jaune asked. "Ruby told me she didn't really know anybody."

"I guess I'm a lot closer with the other Signal students. Ruby here got moved ahead two years, so most of her friends are still back there."

"Oh yeah, she mentioned that."

"Did she now?" Yang asked, glancing slyly at Ruby. "Between you and me, she's a real prodigy. Professor Ozpin invited her to apply personally. Ooh, she makes me _so proud_."

Yang reached over to ruffle Ruby's hair, but she never had a chance. Ruby was unusually quick even without her semblance, and she ducked away, puffing out her cheeks and glaring back.

"Yaaaaaang" she whined.

Jaune was laughing, and it took a second for Ruby to convince herself he wasn't laughing _at_ her.

"Oh man," he said, "it's fun to see someone else getting the older sister treatment for once."

"You have an older sister?" Yang asked, turning back to him.

"Seven of 'em."

Yang's jaw dropped.

" _Seven_? Guess you didn't realize how lucky you are, Ruby. Even two of me would be a nightmare."

"It wasn't so bad," Jaune continued.

The two of them kept talking, chattering about unimportant things. Ruby had preferred the previous conversation about colors, but it would be weird to just bring it up again now.

Somehow this always happened with Yang: her sister had something to say, or a question to ask, and she ended up driving the whole conversation. Ruby never managed to get a word in edgewise, or if she did it felt like she was blurting out an awkward interruption.

"Well, we should really be going." Yang said after a while. "These trunks aren't going to haul themselves."

"I could give you a hand, if you want." Jaune offered.

 _Yes!_ Ruby almost said, but before she could get it out Yang was already waving him off.

"Don't worry about it, I'm sure you need to go get settled in too. Our storage lockers are right next to each other. Thanks for taking care of my little sister, though. I'm sure we'll be seeing you around."

Yang winked at him again. Some sort of message seemed to pass between them, totally opaque to Ruby.

"Alright." Jaune said, smiling. "I'll catch you two around then. Here, let me give you my scroll if you need it." Jaune held out his scroll. Yang already seemed to have hers in hand. She bumped the edge against Jaune's, a soft beep affirming the exchange of contact information. Ruby had to rummage around for an awkward second, but soon they'd bumped scrolls as well.

"Soooo," Yang said once Jaune had walked away, her voice raised into that nettling pitch of sisters everywhere. "A _boy_ , huh Rubes?"

"Yaaaaaaaang!"

~o~O~o~O~o~

By the time Ruby and Yang made it to the amphitheater for their class's commencement speech, it was already mostly packed. Ruby stood on her tiptoes near the back, trying to look for Jaune in the crowd, but she was too short to see very far.

"Looking for something?" Yang asked, smiling and nudging her a little too hard in the ribs.

Ruby looked back at her, pouting.

"What are you teasing me for? I finally talked to someone, like you're always telling me to. You aren't really providing a lot of positive reinforcement here."

Yang giggled, the smile still on her face.

"You did great, Rubes. Just...too much of a good thing can be bad, you know? You come on a little strong sometimes. You were clinging to him like a barnacle. Keep that up, and you're either going to scare him off or give him ideas."

"Aaaargh." Ruby said, putting her head in her hands. "Why does this have to be so gosh-darned _difficult_? Do this, don't do that, oh whoops, you did too much of this. Isn't there a manual or something?"

Yang started to answer, but was interrupted by the sound of a clearing throat, amplified through the hall. Ruby couldn't see, but she assumed the speech was starting.

The crowd quieted down, and professor Ozpin began to speak.

"I will keep this brief. You have traveled here today, all of you, in search of knowledge. Knowledge of our world, past and present. Knowledge of the many sciences, from the laws that govern men to the laws that govern dust. Knowledge of the Grimm, and how they may be hunted. Knowledge of hidden things, which you will not hear even the slightest hint of outside these grounds. Most importantly, you have come here, whether you know it or not, seeking knowledge of yourselves.

"I will be blunt with you: the price of this knowledge is steep. What you learn will be dangerous, and the lessons will be hard. The knowledge preserved by this august institution is not a burden I would wish on anyone against their will. You have not yet begun your education, but once you have fully enrolled, I am afraid that you will not be permitted to withdraw from Beacon. The cost to Vale of half-trained hunters and huntresses is too steep.

"If any of you are uncertain, or if you are here for any reason except your own personal convictions, I implore you to speak with myself or Ms. Goodwitch. You will all be given tonight to reflect on your decision. Tomorrow, you will have your initiation. It will approximate, to the best of our abilities, the difficulty and peril of a career as a hunter or huntress. At any time before, during, or after this initiation - until the very moment you are brought onto this stage and swear to keep Beacon's secrets as your own - you may decline to be included in the entering class. Such students are always free to return in the future, should they change their minds. Once again, if you are uncertain, I strongly encourage you to seek our advice tonight.

"It is an ancient tradition, dating back long before the founding of the academies, that those who fight the Grimm be taught to think for themselves. In the spirit of that tradition, I will leave you with a saying, well-known among graduates of Beacon, and you may attempt to puzzle out its meaning for yourselves while making your decision tonight: 'A hunter is someone who is allowed to be unhappy.'"

A smattering of polite applause followed professor Ozpin's speech. Ruby and Yang exchanged slightly confused glances.

Another voice took over the microphone, feminine and stern. That must be Ms. Goodwitch, Ruby realized. She went over the administrative details of lodgings for the night - they weren't being given rooms yet, apparently - and when to arrive for initiation in the morning.

Ruby made sure to pay attention, but in the back of her mind she was chewing over the headmaster's words. "A hunter is someone who is a allowed to be unhappy."

Looks like she was ahead of the curve again, she thought glumly.

~o~O~o~O~o~

Once Ms. Goodwitch was done speaking, the amphitheater slowly started to empty out, Ruby and Yang exiting with the crowd. The soon-to-be-students spilled out onto Beacon's lawn, and Ruby realized the sun was fairly low in the sky.

Despite Yang's advice, Ruby sort of wanted to talk to Jaune again. She told her sister she was making a quick bathroom run, which she went through with for deniability, ducking back into the building they'd just exited. When she was done, she walked out and stood on top of the steps leading down to the campus, looking out over the gathered crowd.

She looked around for blondes, eyes scanning quickly. There was some girl she didn't know. There was another one. There was Yang, already back with her friends from Signal. Ruby felt a little excluded again, even though she'd been the one to ditch Yang this time.

Ah! There. Jaune was standing off to the side under a tree, talking to some redheaded girl. Ruby felt her stomach tighten a bit.

The girl was tall, nearly as tall as Jaune. She was also stunning, at least in Ruby's opinion. She had an athletic build, almost a little boyish, with plenty of visible muscle. Her hair was the brightest, fullest red that Ruby had ever seen, and she kept it back in a long ponytail.

Actually...wait. A sense of recognition was tickling the back of Ruby's mind. That was...

Oh wow, that was _Pyrrha Nikos_. Ruby recognized her now. It was strange to see her in person, instead of on a scroll.

Jaune said something, and Pyrrha giggled, closing her eyes and putting her hand over her mouth. Ruby recognized that gesture. Yang did it a lot.

As Ruby watched, a third figure sauntered up to the pair. "Sauntered" was definitely the right word, she walked up to them like she owned the tree and everything around it. Wait, Ruby recognized her too! It was the scary girl from the plane, with the white hair.

Ruby's stomach tightened another notch, then slowly released as she realized that there was no way in the world she was going to go bother Jaune while he was talking to those two.

The white-haired girl seemed to be saying something to Pyrrha. Ruby turned away; she didn't want to be caught staring again. She looked down at her shadow - maybe twice as tall as her? It was getting toward the end of the day.

She had a few hours before bed. Might as well do something productive with that time. She sent a quick message to Yang on her scroll so her sister wouldn't worry, then turned and headed for the cliffs.

~o~O~o~O~o~

When it comes to Grimm, geography is king. Every human settlement of any note is placed such that the surrounding geography gives it an edge against the Grimm hordes. Beacon had unusual requirements in this regard. As an academy for hunters, it needed to be close to large populations of Grimm. But it would be something of a distraction if those Grimm could swarm the campus whenever they chose.

Mistral had originally been settled high in the mountains, simply because Grimm didn't like to climb, and even nevermore didn't fly too high unless they reached truly gigantic size. Information on Beacon was scarce, and her dad and uncle refused to talk about it with her, but she assumed it wasn't an accident that the academy had been built atop a sheer cliff.

Ruby peered over that cliff's edge, staring down. Several small streams ran over the side, water falling and falling until it dispersed into mist above a sprawling forest of verdant green trees.

Ruby smiled to herself. There was probably an official way up and down, but for now...

She leaned forward, savoring the moment when her center of balance tipped just _slightly_ too far, and she was past the point of no return. Then, she was falling, tumbling down and down and down, her heart leaping into her throat as some primal part of her brain became convinced she was going to die.

She savored that feeling too, for a moment.

Then she spun in the air, whipping Crescent Rose from behind her and extending him to his full length. She reached her mind into him through her aura, the same way she'd unfolded him, feeling every nook and cranny she'd designed, every awful hack and beautiful solution it took to cram a customizable high-impact sniper rifle and a combat scythe together. She found the gravity round chamber and rotated it into place. There was a satisfying _click_ that she felt in her bones rather than heard.

The cliff was tall enough that she'd probably reach terminal velocity. She aimed Crescent Rose down and a little to the side, eyeballing the angle she needed to land properly. One of her long-term goals was to build a mechanism that would let her control exactly how much gravity dust was in each shot, to make things like this easier. She had a prototype, but the time between shots was too high to be practical.

She waited until the last possible moment, the ground rushing up to meet her, then fired three quick shots, the strange physics of the gravity dust instantly adding a vector to her velocity without any sensation of acceleration. Now she was flying up, very slightly, and to the side, but slower than she'd been when coming down.

She was going maybe 20 miles an hour now? That wouldn't strain her aura too much. She curled into a ball as she hurtled into the foliage, branches whipping against her and further slowing her fall, until she finally hit the ground and skidded the last ten feet or so.

The woods around her were very quiet, and deceptively beautiful. The sun was still in the sky for another hour or two, and she took a moment to enjoy the way its fading light played across the trees.

She was going to feel like a real idiot if her guess about where Beacon kept its Grimm was wrong.

Ruby's heart was beating fast from the fall. That was good, it would help her get in the zone.

She was already down from not being able to work up the courage to talk to Jaune. Yang and her friends didn't help. Yang was always trying so hard to make time for her, and that just made it worse, when she knew her sister was basically hanging out with her out of pity.

This would be easy today.

She closed her eyes, and thought about her mother.

She went over the few clear memories she had of Summer, one by one, to remind herself what had been. Then she thought back to the day they'd heard, how upset Yang and her dad had been. How she'd started crying without knowing why, aware that they were hurting even though she was too young to understand what was wrong. Then she went through the damage, the empty hole in their lives, all the little things that had been slightly off, slightly colder. The anniversary four years later when she'd heard her dad crying through the walls while she tried to fall asleep.

That was as far as she got. She heard a distant growl, then another, then more than she could count. She opened her eyes, blinking away the tiniest hint of tears, and looked around. A pack of beowolves was closing on her, slowly, taking her measure.

The creatures were horrible. They were dark, inky black, and they looked wrong against the backdrop of the forest, like someone had ripped ugly black holes into a beautiful painting.

Ruby felt her throat tighten. She hated Grimm. Everyone said they hated Grimm, but they really hated the idea of Grimm. They hated thinking about them, mostly. Ruby hated the Grimm themselves. She hated knowing that they still existed. She couldn't see one without every part of her crying out to destroy it. When she'd been younger, Yang had had to pull her away from the hunting grounds, telling her that if she took the time to rest and train, she could kill more Grimm tomorrow, or in a year.

 _They shouldn't exist_ , she thought to herself. Her mental voice sounded raw in her head, strained. _They're wrong. They shouldn't be here._

They were so ugly it stung her eyes to look at them. She couldn't stand it, couldn't countenance a world where these things still existed, where they roamed freely, rending people and families and civilization itself apart with malicious indifference.

One of the beasts stepped closer, the lure of her negative emotions overcoming its drive for self-preservation. These beowolves were very young. Ruby was still holding Crescent Rose, his weight so familiar it was forgettable, like eyeglasses perched on her face. The beast growled again, louder, and lunged at her.

The second it was in the air, Ruby felt her semblance in the back of her mind. The excitement, the urgency, the stimulation, the fear for her life and her cold anger and her beating heart and the tiny hint of curiosity as she wondered how most efficiently to carve the beast into pieces, all of these things flowed together into a river that spilled out into her head and down her spine.

Ruby sprang forward as the world slowed, pushing as hard as she could against the soupy air, overcome suddenly with the need to destroy these things. She brought Crescent Rose up in a savage slash that took the beast's head off mid-leap. Its blood gushed out, a slow-motion geyser, and Ruby's soul _sang_ with satisfaction at its end.

~o~O~o~O~o~

 **Boom**

A pause.

 **Boom**

Another pause, slightly longer, so that she started to fall.

Last one.

 **Boom**

With the final shot, Ruby carried herself up and barely over the lip of the Beacon cliffs, landing softly on the dirt. Using gravity rounds to move up a specific distance was much easier, but it might start to get expensive if she did this every day.

She straightened, stowing Crescent Rose behind her back, to find herself face to face with a shield of swirling purple energy and a _very_ irate-looking Ms. Goodwitch. Behind the woman and to her left stood professor Ozpin, who looked considerably more amused.

"Ah," he said. "Ms. Rose. Pleasant evening, isn't it?"

Ms. Goodwitch spoke before Ruby could gather her wits and respond.

"What." the huntress ground out, teeth clenched. "Are you doing here? Did you receive permission to leave campus?"

Ruby flinched. The calm peace she always felt after a hunt was shattered into a million tiny shards. Oh no oh no _oh no_. Was this against the rules somehow? Was she going to be kicked out of Beacon the first night she was here?

"Now, Glynda." Ozpin said, voice calm. "I did go to great lengths to impress on the incoming class that they are not yet students here, and may leave at any time. Ms. Rose appears to have taken that invitation rather literally, but..."

"But _what_ , Ozpin?" Ms. Goodwitch snapped over her shoulder. "She was in the Emerald Forest. Alone. _After dark._ "

Glynda whirled back to Ruby, dismissing her purple construct with a wave. "Do you realize how foolish what you did tonight is? You could have died."

Ruby looked down at the ground, lost for words. Fighting Grimm after dark was definitely asking for trouble, but she'd done it plenty of times before and nothing bad had ever happened. In some ways it was better; Grimm grew less cautious after dark, and she could pull more at once.

Besides, her semblance was tailor-made for escaping from bad situations. If her aura had gotten low, she would have just left.

She utterly failed to say any of this to the fuming teacher in front of her. She tried to speak, but it felt like a hand was squeezing her throat shut.

There was an awkward silence, while Ms. Goodwitch waited for an answer and Ruby totally failed to provide one.

Ozpin cleared his throat.

"Glynda, why don't you finish seeing to the construction of the launchers. I'll escort Ms. Rose back to Beacon, and see that she fully understands our policy on appropriate use of the Emerald Forest.


	3. 1․3 Words of Wisdom

Professor Ozpin set a leisurely pace as he walked Ruby back toward Beacon. It was a warm night, quiet except for the occasional chirp of mating insects, and the professor didn't seem to be in any hurry to scold her.

Ruby slowly relaxed as they walked. She knew she was still in trouble, but it was hard to be on edge when everything was so peaceful.

Professor Ozpin spoke, finally, when they were more than halfway back.

"You aren't in trouble, Ms. Rose. Ms. Goodwitch has had a long night, and I'm sure she will regret her aggressive stance in the morning. She has good reason to be concerned, but ultimately this blunder is on our shoulders. We will have to add an administrative note, next year, that prospective students are not to leave the grounds. A pity; the commencement is already so long..."

Ozpin sighed wistfully.

Why was Ozpin so _nice_ to her?

"Um...thank you." she mumbled.

They walked in silence for a little longer.

"For what it's worth, though, professor - I don't think I was in much danger. My semblance is, well, it keeps me very safe."

She wasn't perfectly safe of course. The world didn't stay slow forever, even when she fought Grimm. But she'd gotten very adept, over the years, at striking quickly and then retreating until her semblance was ready for another burst of speed.

Professor Ozpin nodded.

"I can see why you would believe that, Ms. Rose, with the knowledge available to you. But you must understand, the education you have received thus far is lacking in many respects. Yet another way in which fault for this incident lies on our shoulders. I was the one who approved Signal's curriculum on the Grimm, and I deemed certain facts too dangerous for public consumption."

Ruby rubbed her left arm, unsure how much to say.

"Um...so, my uncle told me to not to tell people about my semblance, but I figure you're, like, a professor and stuff, so..."

Ozpin chuckled.

"Don't worry, Ms. Rose. I had a long discussion with your uncle prior to granting you early admission, and I am intimately familiar with the details of your semblance, at least as far as he understands them. Is there anything significant you have withheld from him?"

Ruby shook her head, then realized Ozpin might not have seen. "No."

"Well, then, Ms. Rose, I can assure you that the Emerald Forest contains numerous threats to your life. The island of Patch, where you have trained until now, is fairly civilized. The Emerald Forest, however, is truly wild, and abuts the Grimmlands themselves. The most frightening threats do not stray so close to the cliffs, but traveling into the forest alone, at night, without supervision, was still terribly unwise."

Ruby gulped.

"Oh..." she said, in a quiet voice. "Um, if you don't mind me asking, professor, what sorts of threats are you talking about? I'm so much faster than any Grimm I've read about that I have trouble imagining."

Professor Ozpin sighed, and for a moment he sounded very old.

"Indeed, Ms. Rose. Trouble imagining is precisely the problem. I'm afraid that until you have completed your initiation, I cannot share any of the forest's more dangerous secrets with you. I _can_ tell you that, even among the ranks of Grimm you have read about, there are threats to you in that forest. Just last year there was a deathstalker, a very old one, and thus quite clever, that had grown smaller rather than larger as it aged. It was terribly quick, and nearly silent. It almost killed a student before his team even knew it was there. We put it down, fortunately, but there may be more."

Ruby gulped again. When she'd had her eyes closed, trying to draw the Grimm to her...

"Five years ago, there was a truly ancient nevermore discovered very close to the cliffs. It fired several waves of its feathers at supersonic speeds before flying off. The feathers were razor sharp, heavy as iron bars, spaced no more than a few inches apart, and spread over half an acre. A student died in that attack, much to our shame, and the beast is still out there."

Ruby was studying the ground very intently as she walked. She _might_ be able to knock enough of those aside with her scythe to make a hole before any impaled her, but she certainly didn't want to have to try.

"Now," Ozpin continued, "I know what you are thinking."

That was a surprise to Ruby, since she wasn't thinking anything in particular.

"You've no doubt determined that tomorrow's initiation will take place in the forest. Indeed, I suspect that was half of why Ms. Goodwitch was so annoyed with you. The surprise is part of the point, you see. In any case, during initiation itself, you will be permitted to travel the forest with other students. If you combine your talents, exercise caution, and shelter during the night, then I expect you will find the forest difficult but manageable. We've had a handful of serious injuries during initiation over the years, but no deaths."

Well. That was news to Ruby. She'd been too wrapped up in her own head to even wonder why Ms. Goodwitch and professor Ozpin were at the cliffs, but they must have been setting something up for tomorrow. She probably would have figured it out once she'd had some time to think, though.

They were approaching Beacon now. In a few more minutes they'd be at the great hall, where the prospective students were staying tonight.

Ozpin drew to a stop, and Ruby stopped beside him, not making eye contact.

"I believe I can leave you here, Ms. Rose. Two things, however: a word of advice, and a request."

Ruby nodded mutely.

"First, the advice. Semblances, as I'm sure you know, aren't fair. Yours is one of the least fair I have ever seen. I'm given to understand that it is somewhat less efficacious against those with aura, since their own aura may resist or even overcome the extreme temporal dilation you produce, but against Grimm it is a truly remarkable gift. It is my belief that you will be one of the greatest huntresses Beacon has ever produced, if you can avoid dying alone in a dark forest before you get an education."

The professor smiled as he spoke, taking the sting out of his words.

"That is not my advice, however. My advice is this: remember that Grimm aren't fair, either. If you follow the path you are on now to its end, you can and will encounter Grimm which are as difficult for you to fight as you are for a beowolf, and likely not for the reasons you expect. Until that happens, try not to grow complacent."

Ruby feld a chill go down her spine. She would make sure not to.

"Finally, my request. I will not ask you to keep what you know of the initiation tomorrow a secret. That would be a terrible violation of the bond of trust between you and your sister, and of the pact that students everywhere must hold against their instructors. Instead, I would ask that you limit the spread of what you know to a few close friends. It really would be _frightfully_ disappointing for Ms. Goodwitch if she doesn't get to see any surprised faces tomorrow morning."

Ozpin gave her a wink, and before she could quite muster a response, clapped her on the shoulder and began walking back toward the cliffs with a spring in his step.

Ruby called after him, when he was already an awkward distance away. "Um...Professor! Thank you! For everything!"

Ozpin waved his cane without turning around, and Ruby smiled.

Maybe she had _two_ friends here, even if it did make her a bit of a teacher's pet.

~o~O~o~O~o~

"Where." a pajama-clad Yang growled, eyes already flecked with crimson. "In the goddamn hell. Have you _been_."

Ruby backed up a step, waving her hands in front of her face.

"Whoah whoah whoah! Wait a second, Yang. I told you exactly where I was. Check your scroll."

Yang stepped closer, into Ruby's personal space. She looked mad. Ruby had a brief, irrational moment of fear that her sister was going to sock her in the face, but instead Yang wrapped her up in an enormous hug.

"Oof..." Ruby managed to get out. "Yang, you're crushing me."

"You deserve it, dummy. Your message said you'd be back before sundown. That was _hours_ ago. And you didn't answer when I called..."

Ruby looked down guiltily.

"Sorry. It's hard to notice my scroll during...well, you know."

Yang finally let her go, but held on to her shoulders, looking her in the face. At least the blonde girl's eyes were lilac again.

"What about when you were done?" she asked. "I left you like a dozen messages."

"Um..." Ruby said, looking away. "Some...other things happened after. Promise you won't get mad?"

Yang raised an eyebrow, skeptically.

"We'll see. Spill."

~o~O~o~O~o~

After relating the whole story, calming Yang down a second time, and suffering through an admittedly-deserved lecture, Ruby finally managed to pry Yang off her long enough to go get changed into her pajamas.

Ruby found a big locker room with a row of showers at the back a little ways off from where they were sleeping. She brought her bag in, and after quickly checking that she was alone, stripped out of her clothes and stepped into the shower for a rinse.

Aura tended to normalize away dirt and grime, so hunters and huntresses didn't really need to shower. But it felt good, and your self-image could start to drift if you never washed yourself.

Ruby had a more immediate concern. Aura _tended_ to normalize away dirt and grime, but sometimes there were quirks.

Ruby stuck her head under the water. It was torrential, and steaming hot. After a moment of resistance, her aura gave up and decided that she was getting wet.

The water ran clean through most of her hair, but at the tips it came out a gunky red; foul, dark, and thicker than it had gone in. Ruby left her head like this for a few minutes until the water ran through cleanly, breathing a satisfied sigh when her hair was finally clean.

She got out of the shower. There were no towels - typical. She wrung the water out of her hair as best she could, and trusted her aura to take care of the rest.

She put on her pajamas, then went to the mirror to take a look. Sure enough, where the tips of her hair had been a faded burgundy this morning, now she saw bright red streaks hanging down beside her silver eyes.

It had been a nasty surprise, the first time she'd cut a Grimm and been sprayed by its blood. Aura was supposed to protect you from that sort of thing. If you were dunked in a pool, sure, you'd get wet, but a brief spray of blood? That should slide right off.

Her aura disagreed. For some reason her self-image at age twelve thought being splattered in Grimm blood was just dandy. Over years of washing it off, scrubbing it out of her clothes, and dying her hair back to black, her aura had finally caught on and started sloughing it off when it touched her.

All except for the tips of her hair. Maybe it was because some part of her still felt like destroying the Grimm should be a bloody affair. Maybe it was because she'd spent so long struggling with it, and that struggle itself was part of her identity. Maybe the red highlights just matched her outfit. Who knew?

She could hide it, if she really wanted to. She didn't carry hair dye any more, but if she lathered and rinsed a few more times it would be the same color as this morning, and after about a dozen more it would barely be noticeable.

It wasn't worth the effort, though. People would notice eventually, and honestly, taking hour-long showers after every hunt was probably even weirder than having red-tipped hair.

Satisfied that she wasn't going to gunk up her pillow, Ruby left the bathroom, ready for bed, combat outfit stuffed into her bag, and way too wired to sleep.

~o~O~o~O~o~

Ruby lay on the thin sleeping bag Beacon had provided, head in Yang's lap as the older girl brushed her hair. Yang was too rough with the brush, which hurt, but the attention felt good.

Most of the students were already asleep, or at least lying down quietly, but the two of them were far from the only ones up. People were understandably nervous, and some of them were probably jetlagged. People came from all over to go to Beacon.

Ruby tapped away at her scroll while Yang brushed. She liked to keep notes on things. Not really a journal, per se, just a list of things to remember, and a tally of the Grimm she'd killed.

 _Be more cautious of the Grimm,_ she wrote in one section. Then, under it, bullet points:

\- _Grimm can be small and stealthy._

\- _Grimm can have AoE attacks which are hard to dodge._

\- _Worse things, unknown, difficult to imagine. General caution. Dangerous for reasons I don't expect?_

\- _Grimm aren't fair._

\- _Don't get complacent._

After a moment's thought, she started another section.

 _A hunter is someone who is allowed to be unhappy._

Ruby had complicated feelings about aphorisms. (In fact, that might tell you everything you need to know about her personality, that she thought about the topic enough to have complicated feelings.)

The earliest aphorisms she'd ever been exposed to were, essentially, tricks. They were things adults told kids to change their behavior. "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." "Two wrongs don't make a right."

Ruby had figured out very early on that these sayings were a sort of memetic virus. They sounded right, somehow, even if they were obviously wrong. If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all? What would the world look like if the police followed that rule?

But it didn't matter if they were obviously wrong. They stuck in your head and changed your behavior in ways adults found desirable, springing to mind unbidden when certain situations arose.

Ruby's position on the matter grew somewhat more subtle when she took up engineering, and discovered that the discipline was full of _useful_ aphorisms. "Measure twice, cut once." It was useful precisely because it stuck with you and sprang to mind unbidden right before you did something stupid.

They were still designed to change behavior, but they were designed to change her behavior in ways _she_ found desirable.

If "Two wrongs don't make a right." is a memetic parasite, "Your hands are always dirty in the shop." is a memetic symbiote. You'd happily accept it into your brain.

So when she heard "A hunter is someone who is allowed to be unhappy.", she had two questions. What is this memetic virus trying to accomplish? And who benefits?

"Ruby," Yang's voice broke into her thoughts from behind. "You aren't seriously thinking about that corny line from the end of Ozpin's speech, are you?"

Ruby pressed the screen of her phone flat against her pajama top. "Yaaaaang." she whined. "Don't look at my _screen_. What if it was something private?"

"Then you shouldn't be writing it while I'm being nice enough to brush your hair. What, do you think I'm just going to sit here staring into space? You need to remember you aren't the only person in the room, sis. You never know who might be paying attention."

"Maybe it wouldn't be a problem if my sister wasn't so nosy..." Ruby muttered.

Yang gave the brush an extra hard tug through her hair, making Ruby yelp. " _I'm_ not your problem, doofus. If you're going to be a huntress, you're going to need to learn to be a liiiiitle more discreet. Like, for example, when you got back and started blabbing to me about all the things you were supposed to be keeping close to your chest, in the middle of a crowded room.

Ruby blushed.

"Fine..." she mumbled. "That was silly. Do you think anyone overhead?"

Ruby felt Yang move under her head, probably a shrug.

"Who knows? It's possible. I guess we'll find out tomorrow how far it spread."

"Oh! That reminds me," Ruby said, perking up. "I should make sure Jaune knows." She raised her scroll back up, flicking over to contacts and running down the short list until she found his name.

Yang sighed somewhere overhead. Ruby wasn't sure what that meant.

"Er...or maybe I shouldn't?" she ventured, hesitant.

"No, it's fine. Go for it."

"It doesn't _sound_ fine."

"It's totally fine. You just sounded a little eager."

"No I didn't."

She felt Yang shrug again. "Alright, you didn't."

" _Yaaaang-_ "

Yang ruffled Ruby's hair, letting her hand rest there. She seemed to be done brushing.

Ruby lay there for second, enjoying the amiable silence.

"So," she said after a bit. "What do you think it means, Yang?"

"Your excited tone of voice?"

" _No._ The thing Professor Ozpin said, about hunters being unhappy."

"Ruby, who cares? It's just some dumb saying."

"He told us to think about it."

"Just because he's a professor doesn't mean everything he says is a homework assignment. He probably just likes to end his speech with that saying because he thinks it sounds cool."

Ruby rolled her eyes. It was an understatement to say Yang was better than her at the whole people thing, but her sister had some blind spots. One of those blind spots was people like Ruby. Yang never seemed to get her, or at least, there was something important her sister was missing.

Ruby didn't think professor Ozpin was exactly like her, but there were commonalities. He was a man who cared about certain things. He chose his words carefully, for one thing, putting them together precisely as he meant to. And the way he spoke was a dead giveaway to Ruby that they were alike. The excitement when he spoke of teaching students to think for themselves. The slight hush when he spoke of secrets and dangerous things. A certain tone which sometimes leaked through and let Ruby know he had just said something clever, which he expected very few of those listening to understand. All of those stood out clear as day to her.

She couldn't imagine that a man like professor Ozpin would end his first speech to the incoming class with something inconsequential. Running Beacon Academy was what he was _doing_ with his life. It would be as out of character as her building Crescent Rose's barrel slightly crooked.

Actually, now that she was thinking back, what were his exact words? He hadn't actually told them to think about it. He'd said they could attempt to puzzle out its meaning for themselves.

He'd literally said that.

How could Yang be so _stupid_ sometimes?

She finished messaging Jaune what she knew about initiation, asking him not to tell too many people, and switched back to her notes. She added some text to the appropriate section: _Maybe a puzzle disguised as an aphorism? Very strange puzzle if so. Maybe the purpose of the aphorism is the puzzle?_

Yang groaned. She was still reading over Ruby's shoulder, apparently.

"Ruby, don't waste your time on this."

"Just humor me, Yang. What do you think it means?"

"It means exactly what he said, Ruby. We're allowed to be unhappy, because we can defend ourselves when the Grimm show up. Normal people don't have that luxury."

Ruby nodded, typing it in word for word.

You couldn't be wrong about a memetic virus meant, not if it was any good. It meant whatever people thought it meant. It would be better to ask a few more people, though.

Ruby's scroll buzzed, the first few lines of Jaune's reply sliding up from the bottom of the screen.

Ruby wanted to read it, but she was getting tired of Yang's snooping. She yawned dramatically instead, dropping the phone on her chest and stretching both arms over her head. "Whelp," she said, "time to get some sleep?"


	4. 1․4 Crisis Response

Ozpin stood in front of them, the sheer drop of the beacon cliffs behind him. Ruby thought he cut a rather distinguished figure with the steaming mug of coffee in his hand, lit by the barely-rising sun from the east.

The incoming class stood arrayed before him, each of them on a strange metal platform, waiting for him to explain what they were doing here.

"The four kingdoms and seven principalities," he began without preamble, "cover barely a tenth of a percent of our world's land mass. They are tiny dots of light and order on a canvas of darkness. Even today, the lands outside these pockets of civilization are largely mysterious to us.

"But we call our world 'Remnant' for a reason. Scattered throughout these unexplored lands are the remains of our long-forgotten past. The first duty of any hunter or huntress is to protect the people. But in times of peace, when the Grimm are not an imminent threat, we spend much of our time mapping these lands, exploring the many ruins that sprawl across our world, and retrieving relics left by those who came before us.

"These gifts of knowledge and artifice from our ancestors are why Vale enjoys the quality of life we do today. From the secrets of working dust, to the wrecks that formed the prototype for modern airships, every part of our world has been shaped by the discoveries of those who had the courage to venture into the unknown.

"Your initiation today will give you your first taste of what this life is like, as well as accomplishing certain administrative necessities. Each of you is currently standing on a powerful catapult. You will be flung, one by one, to a random location in the Emerald Forest behind me. There, you will make your way north, fighting through the legions of Grimm which inhabit the forest, and attempt to locate an abandoned temple which was discovered here long ago. The temple is no more than a day's travel on foot, but getting there will be a challenge for most of you.

"You are encouraged and expected to meet up with your fellow students on your way to the temple. The forgotten lands are rarely braved alone, after all. The first person you make eye contact with inside the forest will be your parter for the next four years, should both of you continue on to enroll at Beacon. Please do not attempt to cleverly circumvent this rule. In fact, you should consider preventing Ms. Goodwitch from becoming annoyed with you one of the parameters for this mission. You will be graded on your performance as a pair."

There were murmurings from the crowd after that. Ruby felt a little confused herself.

Ozpin continued on, undeterred.

"Once you have found your partner and located the ruin, you will delve into it and retrieve one of the relics we have placed in the inner sanctum. Exactly one relic per pair, to be precise. If you return to these cliffs with your relic within three days, your initiation will be complete.

"This is a difficult task, and some of you will fail to complete it. I realize that you did not come here today expecting an exam. This is by design: the most important tests you encounter in your career as a hunter or huntress will be those which nobody told you to prepare for. Those who fail this initiation are, of course, welcome to reapply next year."

The murmuring grew louder at this. The boy to Ruby's right swore under his breath. Ozpin stood in front of them calmly, sipping his coffee until they quieted down.

"Of course," he continued, "if the thought of being thrown off a cliff into a forest of deadly Grimm isn't to your liking, I would again strongly encourage you to consider delaying your matriculation. Several of your peers have already withdrawn after a discussion with me last night, and many more will withdraw before the end of the day. There is no shame in it. Many of the greatest hunters and huntresses this institution has had the honor of producing delayed their enrollment until they felt they were ready, and many of those who declined enrollment entirely went on to lead successful and fulfilling civilian lives.

"Now, we will go down the line, starting with the student furthest to my right. Each of you should ask any questions you might have, although I will ask that you please keep it brief, and then clearly indicate whether you would prefer to delay your application to Beacon, or be catapulted into the forest behind me."

Ozpin raised his cane and pointed at the boy furthest down the line.

"Do you have any questions?"

"Yes, sir." he said, his voice soft but nonetheless carrying clearly. "What are our chances of dying on this mission?"

"An excellent question. Nobody has ever died during initiation before. With that said, you are, I remind you again, being catapulted off a cliff into a forest of Grimm. We cannot guarantee your safety. Anything else?"

The boy shook his head. "No. I am ready to begin."

There was a short pause, and then the metal plate below him snapped up faster than Ruby's eye could follow. The boy's aura flared pink as it compensated for the enormous force on his body, and then he was flying through the air.

Ozpin went down the line, answering the occasional question before sending the student flying, until he got to Jaune.

Jaune didn't look very good. He was only about a dozen spots down the line from her, next to some green-haired girl, and she could see that his face was deathly pale. He seemed to be sweating, too.

He was wearing a light backpack, presumably full of supplies. Ruby admired the preparation. She'd considered doing the same, since she knew they were headed into the forest, but had decided that it would slow her down too much in combat, and had settled for packing a few extra things into her cargo pockets.

"Mr. Arc?" professor Ozpin said. "Any questions?"

Jaune swallowed, hard. "Could...could I have a moment to think, sir?"

"Of course." Ozpin took another calm sip of his coffee.

Jaune was looking at something off to his right. Ruby tried to follow his gaze, but as far as she could tell he was looking into empty air off the side of the cliff.

What was wrong? He seemed terrified of something. Ruby knew he'd had an unusual education, but surely he'd fought Grimm before. He'd never have been accepted into Beacon otherwise.

There were a couple of coughs down the line from him, but Jaune didn't even seem to notice. Finally, he closed his eyes, scrunching them tight, and when he opened them he looked determined, if still scared.

"No questions, sir. I'm ready."

Professor Ozpin stared at him. "You are absolutely sure, Mr. Arc? I remind you again that there is no shame in walking away from this."

"I'm sure, sir."

Ozpin gave the smallest of nods. He looked mildly confused for some reason. Maybe he also didn't understand why Jaune was so scared.

There were a few seconds of silence, and then everything went wrong.

The metal plate under Jaune's feet snapped up, but there was no flare of aura compensating for the force. Instead, there was a sickening _crunch_ , and then he was flying through the air with both legs broken, screaming.

Ruby's mind screeched to a halt as the students around her exploded into a panicked cacophony. She couldn't, what, what had _happened_ -

There another metallic sound to her right, and suddenly Pyrrha Nikos was flying through the air too, her catapult somehow having fired out of order.

Someone jumped backward off their plate in a panic, and soon everyone was scrambling away from the devices.

Ruby looked back at Jaune's catapult, her mind still trying to catch up with the situation even as adrenaline pumped into her system. It was smeared with blood.

That was enough. Her semblance slammed into her mind like a battering ram. There was no mix of feelings, motivations, subjective experiences. There was just a dark well of dread that Jaune might be dying while she stood there. It washed through her like a torrent, suffusing her, resisted only by a raw scream of defiance in her head, and a sensation of something hard and bright that refused to yield.

Her mouth hardened. The panic dropped away. She needed to _act_.

Pyrrha was in the air. By some quirk of fate, her catapult had fired her the same direction Jaune was going. No, that was ridiculous, she must have aimed it somehow.

There was no way she'd catch him. You couldn't hit a moving target Jaune's size from this distance. Even Atlassian missiles had targeting systems that let them make small adjustments as they closed with their targets.

But she was trying. Ruby would try too.

She felt a surge of shame at the fact that Pyrrha had beaten her to it. Ruby was the one with the speed semblance. It was just that she'd panicked, and-

No, that wasn't a productive line of thought. She could beat herself up over it later.

Ruby reached back for Crescent Rose. She skipped the usual dramatic twirl, just detached him from her back and extended him at the ground. She didn't even notice the moment her aura made connection.

She felt him extending, slowly, ever so slowly, internal friction and air resistance fighting her semblance every step of the way. She didn't have time for that. She _pushed_ , and her semblance complied, dutifully drawing on her aura as it politely told the laws of physics to shut up and get out of her way.

Blood-red rose petals poured from the joints of her weapon as the friction vanished, the objective physical principles transmuted into something subjective, something more _her_. The gravity rounds were still already chambered. She fired at the ground, again and again, until she was flying toward Jaune, streaming rose petals as the air slid around her with no resistance.

~o~O~o~O~o~

Ruby didn't have fine enough control. If Jaune's aura was malfunctioning somehow, which seemed to be the case, she'd have to match his speed almost exactly, then lower them both to the ground gently enough to keep him alive.

She had twenty gravity rounds to play with, and she'd already spent several getting up to speed. The rounds made large changes to her velocity. Regular gravity was pulling on both of them. It was kind of a hard problem, and there wouldn't be much room for error.

She was kicking herself for launching into the air at Jaune without thinking. Now she was committed to trying to grab him. She had a lot of time in the air to think, and she realized that what she should have done was grab Ms. Goodwitch and bring her close enough to Jaune to levitate him down. Ruby wasn't 100% sure what the professor's semblance could do, but it seemed like a better bet than her current plan.

Ruby had to stop herself, again, from wasting mental energy on berating herself. There was no point. She went back to trying to figure out a clever combination of vectors that would get her and Jaune to the ground safely.

As she did, though, she noticed something strange. Pyrrha Nikos, who really had been on a remarkably accurate intercept course, but who now looked like she was going to overshoot, was slowing down slightly faster than she should. It was subtle - Ruby never would have noticed it if she'd been back at the launch site, or if time had been moving at a normal speed - but her course was definitely shifting, very slightly.

At this rate, it was very plausible Pyrrha would actually manage to intercept Jaune. Ruby felt a small stirring of hope.

Nobody knew what Pyrrha Nikos's semblance was. There were a lot of theories. One of the most popular among her fans was that she was literally fated to win; that the universe would fudge things for her, just a little, so that she was successful. It had started when someone had tallied up all the times her opponents had just barely missed her with a finishing blow, and once the idea was out there, people started seeing evidence of it everywhere in her footage. People thought it was the universe fudging things for her because these tiny nudges seemed to happen regardless of whether or not she could actually see her opponent at the time.

Ruby didn't know what the truth was, but she was prepared to trust that Pyrrha knew what she was doing.

Over the next few seconds, Pyrrha's course corrected further and further, until it looked almost certain that she'd manage to catch him. Ruby hesitated briefly, then made the call. She'd be more likely to mess things up than help if she kept trying to put herself on an intercept course for the two of them.

She felt just the tiniest bit of frustration, that it was Pyrrha and not her that would save Jaune - that it was out of her hands - but she squashed the feeling ruthlessly.

As Ruby slowly let go of responsibility for the landing, she felt her semblance start to slip. First the stream of petals slowed to a trickle, and then stopped, the air whipping against her face again. Next the world started to speed up, barely noticeable, but faster every second, until in a rush she was dumped back into the world, hurtling toward the trees.

As if on cue, a twenty-foot nevermore rose high out of the forest in front of them, tearing through the air like jagged black rent in the sky. Ruby flinched, shocked for a moment by the sudden awfulness. Of _course_. Jaune was probably in a tremendous amount of pain. Grimm would come flocking.

It was almost painful to look at, but she kept her eyes on it. This was something she could do, at least. She fired two more of her precious gravity rounds, putting herself ahead of the pair. It would be a few more seconds until her semblance could activate again; she'd have to fight it in real time.

As she got closer to it, the nevermore's attention shifted to her. Fortunately she had more than enough negative emotions jumbling around in her head to keep its attention.

The oversized bird screamed, swaying the trees below with enormous pumps of its powerful wings, and then suddenly it was diving at her.

~o~O~o~O~o~

 **Interlude: Ozpin**

"Everyone line back up, please." Glynda said, smacking her riding crop against her left hand loud enough to make several students jump. "Ms. Nikos' launcher did not malfunction, but if you wish, you may stand behind yours until your turn."

Ozpin tuned out the proceedings, giving his full attention to the tablet scroll in front of him where Ruby Rose and Ms. Nikos were both engaged with the Grimm.

He certainly hadn't been expecting _this_ to happen. It fit, after a fashion, but...no, it would be too easy to deceive himself. He was still missing something.

His mind flashed back to the Arc boy, in the moments before launch, eyes fixed intently on empty space. What had he been thinking about? What could _possibly_ have convinced him to go through with it?

Three possibilities came immediately to mind.

One, the boy was insane. Honestly, this was the most likely explanation. Something like one in a thousand people were seriously mentally ill, a much higher base rate than the other possibilities.

Two, the boy knew he would be saved. Even Ozpin hadn't seen how it could happen, so if Jaune Arc was able to, it implied one of a very select group of players were involved.

Three...well, the boy's aura wasn't activated, but there were powers in this world beyond semblances. He would have to consult the relic, once the initiation was complete.

Ozpin was pulled out of his thoughts by the sound of raised voices. Taiyang's other daughter was suspended in the air by purple shackles, eyes burning, shouting at Glynda. Glynda's responses were stern but calm, which only seemed to enrage the young girl further.

Ozpin sighed. He really needed to acquire an assistant with better people skills, to complement Glynda's otherwise exceptional abilities.

He glanced over the tablet scroll one more time. Everything seemed to be wrapping up nicely.

"Alright," he said. Everyone else on the cliff stopped talking, waiting for him to go on. It was still a strange experience, being in charge, even after all these years.

"Ms. Xiao Long, your sister is well. She managed to attract the attention of a large number of Grimm, but has been handling them admirably, and seems to be in no immediate danger."

He smiled at her kindly. That seemed to mollify the girl a little, although her eyes were still a deep, deep red.

Glynda didn't release her shackles, and Ozpin didn't ask her to.

"Ms. Nikos managed, somehow, to intercept Mr. Arc, land safely in the forest, and evade or destroy those Grimm which did not break off to pursue Ms. Rose. Mr. Arc is seriously injured, but stable, and Ms. Nikos is administering care to him as we speak."

That got a brief cheer from the crowd.

"Seeing these events, it seems natural to assume that Mr. Arc somehow exhausted his aura before arriving here today, although it is not clear how or why that would be the case. We will be conducting a full investigation of this incident later, but for now, I would ask that you respect his privacy and not inquire any further."

Ozpin looked around. It appeared that the students had, eventually, yielded to Glynda and mostly lined up again, although none of them were actually standing on their platforms.

He pointed his cane at the boy who had been standing next to Jaune Arc. "Mr. Windslow, I believe you were up next. I'm afraid that we are rather behind schedule, so please, no questions unless they are urgent. Do you wish to proceed?"

The boy had a somewhat haggard look on his face. He looked to his left, at the smear of blood on Jaune's launcher. Then he looked to his right, at Pyrrha Nikos' prematurely sprung one, and at Ruby Rose's, which was riddled with bullet holes.

Finally, he looked straight ahead, at the spot where the three of them had landed, and where even now half a dozen largeish nevermore were circling hungrily overhead.

"Oh _hell_ no."


	5. 1․5 Path Dependency

Ruby was perched in the tallest tree she could find, watching a nevermore through Crescent Rose's scope.

The nevermore was a mile or two away, and it was staring at her. It couldn't _see_ her, of course, but it could sense her negative emotions. Despite this, it wasn't actually flying at her. It was the perfect age: young enough to be scared of a single student, but old enough to act on that fear and stay away.

Ruby hugged the trunk, holding as still as possible to keep the scope steady. She was already wearing earbuds plugged into her scroll, and she gently hit the play button, trying not to jostle Crescent Rose.

A home-study lecture series on linear algebra started to play. She listened to it intently, trying to follow along. It was really hard without being able to see the screen. The professor narrated as he wrote on the chalkboard, but holding all of that state in her head was mentally taxing.

After a few minutes, the nevermore started to lose interest in her. In her experience, nothing crowded out negative emotions like trying to do math in your head.

The nevermore finally looked away. It shuffled its feet, reorienting to face north-by-northwest. Ruby looked up from the scope, finding her scroll and pausing the lecture.

She had a local map of the forest, which she annotated with her best guess of the nevermore's location, and the direction it had looked after losing interest in her. Hopefully Jaune was in that direction.

She didn't have any bars, or she would have tried to call him. There was something infuriating about being within a few miles of the CCT without any signal. Not even the short range mesh network was working. Jamming the forest during initiation made sense - it would be trivial to meet up with people, otherwise - but Ruby had really hoped they would make an exception after what happened to Jaune.

After she'd landed, there had been an endless stream of Grimm to fight off. At first she'd been able to hear the blasts from Pyrrha's shotgun nearby, but they'd quickly grown fainter, the girl presumably trying to escape the swarm of Grimm.

Ruby had considered trying to follow, but had decided that the best thing she could do was try to keep the Grimm off of them. Fortunately, keeping the attention of Grimm was practically her specialty.

She'd gone to a pretty dark place, just to make absolutely sure they all flocked to her, and once the last one was gone she'd just sat on the ground and bawled her eyes out for a solid five minutes.

At least nobody was there to see it. She hated letting people see her cry. It made her feel like a kid, but more importantly, she didn't want anyone worrying about her. It was _her_ job to worry about people.

Ruby's eyes flicked to the corner of her screen. 60% aura remaining. She'd probably burned about 20% defying physics for as long as she had, and then she'd taken a couple hits in the fight afterward.

Ruby sat glumly for a second, then shook her head, sliding down and hopping branch to branch until she reached the forest floor.

There was no point sitting around feeling bad. Honestly, it was probably a good sign the network was still jammed. _Surely_ if a student had died, professor Ozpin wouldn't just continue initiation like nothing had happened? Last night, when he'd spoken of the student who died in the nevermore attack, he hadn't sounded like he took such things lightly.

Ruby looked at the map on her scroll, plotting a course in her head. She wouldn't be able to use the interface with her semblance active. (Not even by pushing. Or, at least, she'd never been able to push hard enough to make her scroll's processor speed up.)

Her semblance had been on a hair trigger ever since landing in the forest. It made sense; her stimulation levels were through the roof. Honestly, even without what happened to Jaune she would probably be pretty ready to go. Between the Grimm, the stakes, the excitement, the novelty, the urgency, and the little puzzles like how to find other students and the temple, this was her element.

Just thinking about it like that was enough. Her semblance tipped again, the sensation intimately familiar, and as soon as it did she took off as fast as she could toward Jaune's probable location.

While she ran through the eerily still forest, she tried to keep herself distracted. It wouldn't do to show up with a trail of Grimm behind her, which meant she couldn't let her mind linger on Jaune's bloody-

Nope. She couldn't let her mind linger on _that_.

Instead, she tried to think of ways they could locate the temple. Ozpin had said it was no more than a day's travel on foot. That was maybe 30 miles? Call it 100 in case he was accounting for aura?

A hundred-mile radius was way too much ground to search. There had to be a better way...

~o~O~o~O~o~

It took Ruby over an hour of tracking before she detected any sign of human life. Even with her semblance to cover distance quickly, finding Grimm that would point her in the right direction was arduous. And after all that work, all she would get was the rough direction of a moving target.

She had apparently gotten close enough, though. She heard a low _boom_ , barely audible, but unmistakably the sound of dust. She couldn't identify the type; she was far enough away that only the low tones made it to her. Maybe a mile, with the way the forest would break up the noise?

In her current state, the surge of excitement from the noise was enough to tip her semblance all on its own, and in a moment she was off, dashing toward the sound.

~o~O~o~O~o~

It wasn't Jaune.

After a few subjective minutes of running, with one semblance reactivation in the middle, she finally emerged into a large clearing, the source of the noise clearly visible in the very middle.

It was the small girl with white hair that had caught her staring on the airship ride over. There were a handful of boarbatusk bodies scattered around her, unmoving but still in one piece. That made sense, actually. Ruby could see now that the girl was holding a rapier. They were probably full of tiny holes.

Standing in front of the girl was a yawning black chasm. An ursa, when she blinked and looked again. It was big, bigger than any Ruby had ever seen, but not truly ancient. The gnarled white bones that pierced out through its hide were too rough and messy. An ancient ursa, god forbid, would have a more complicated pattern, with more regularity. She'd heard that the oldest of Grimm could look beautiful, in a perverse sort of way, just from the intricacy of their bonework.

The beast's feet were trapped in a jagged patch of ice. That must have been the sound Ruby heard. It was a nasty piece of work, covered in wickedly sharp spikes that stuck out at odd angles. Ruby watched as the ursa slowly, ever so slowly, strained against its prison, the spears of ice drawing small trickles of blood as it pressed against them.

The trap didn't look like it would hold much longer.

The girl had her rapier pointed at the ursa, her mouth set in a hard line, but her face otherwise stoic.

Ruby felt her semblance start to slip. She had maybe thirty seconds?

She jumped toward the abomination, something in the back of her mind roaring in approval even as she dispassionately considered how best to disassemble it.

The bone structure on its head was too well-developed to lop the whole thing off in a single strike. The creature's mask had grown back toward its shoulders in interlocking plates, even as the spikes on its back had curled forward into a crude cage around its neck.

Grimm bones were no joke. Ruby didn't want to cut through that unless she had to.

Its eye sockets were big enough that she could drive her entire scythe blade straight into its head, avoiding the skull entirely, but she'd been warned that wasn't always enough to stop older Grimm, and it would take time to line it up. She didn't want to be near it when her semblance wore off.

She was thinking about this wrong. She wanted to end the horrible thing so badly, it was distracting her from her actual goal. What could she do to make sure it didn't maul anyone while her semblance was down?

Her eyes darted to the creature's paws. They were overdeveloped, too, but the exposed bones had grown into spikes and extra claws instead of defensive structures. The joints of the wrist were mostly unprotected.

Ruby deployed Crescent Rose as she closed the distance, trailing him behind her. She ducked under the ursa's arm and drew Crescent Rose across her body as she passed, sliding the blade directly into the delicate junction between paw and forearm.

Grimm didn't have souls, and so there was no aura to resist the brutal physics of a razor-sharp scythe blade hitting its flesh at superhuman speeds. The hide, fur, and muscle parted like overripe fruit, and then Crescent Rose was digging into bone.

The bone was harder. The thing's internal skeleton must have been more developed, too, because Crescent Rose started to slow as she dragged him through the dense bone, finally stopping a little over halfway through.

Ruby considered using a gravity shot to finish the cut, but she only had twelve left. Instead she held onto Crescent Rose as tightly as she could, jumping up like a pole vaulter going backward over the bar, and kicked the ursa's claw as hard as she could with both feet.

That did it. The bone gave with what would probably be a sickening _snap_ to anyone hearing it in real time.

That had taken longer than she'd hoped. She could _probably_ get to the other arm before her semblance collapsed, but she didn't want to risk it.

Ruby was in the air from her kick, which was unfortunate. Her semblance didn't make gravity affect her any more strongly than normal, so leaving the ground meant she'd be stuck floating in the air for a while. It was one reason she'd settled on such a long weapon, all those years ago.

She used Crescent Rose like a push pole, shoving herself off the Ursa. She sent herself to the side, toward the tree line.

Time started to speed up again just as she left the creature's range, and by the time she'd skidded to a halt on the dirt, the world was back.

The ursa roared in pain, impossibly loud, the sheer volume forcing her back a step as it began to thrash. The ice at its feet groaning ominously.

The white-haired girl unleashed a blast of energy from the tip of her rapier, but jerked as she did so, her head turning to follow Ruby and throwing off her aim. The activated ice dust went wide, mising by several feet.

They both stared at each other for a second. Ruby was wondering how in the _hell_ that girl was getting activated ice dust to cohere over that kind of distance, and the girl was presumably wondering exactly what had just happened.

The girl gathered her wits first, to her credit, frowning and jerking her head back toward the struggling ursa. Ruby got the message, but there wasn't much she could do. She didn't want to get anywhere near that thing without her semblance up.

The ice at the ursa's feet finally gave, and then it was after her.

Ruby had been expecting it. Grimm always went after her first. When she'd been younger, she'd thought it was because of her mother. Pure narcissism, in retrospect. But it had been easy to believe, as a child, that nobody else's grief could possibly compare to hers.

For a while they'd thought that it was her semblance; that the negative emotions she felt while accelerated built up somehow, and proved irresistible once she was thrust back into normal time. But the effect didn't seem to get stronger or weaker based on how much she used her semblance. And in any case, it wasn't like the Grimm were detecting her from farther away, like they would if she was giving off strong negative emotions. They just tried to kill her first, if they could.

For now, all she was sure of was that the Grimm hated her as much as she hated them.

The ursa lumbered at her, shockingly fast even with its awkward three-legged gait. Ruby had put herself very close to the edge of the clearing, and she took off running into the trees. She was fast even without her semblance, but the ursa was faster; she needed to put some obstacles in between them.

The monster was maybe thirty feet behind her when it entered the forest. It slammed into the trees like a bowling ball the size of a cottage, bending or toppling them as it ran, barely slowing.

That wasn't good. Ruby's heart started to pound. She'd underestimated its raw physical strength and speed. Nothing natural could bulldoze through trees like that, even at that thing's size.

Safety first, then resource conservation. When she realized the thing was still closing, she fired a gravity round straght down, flinging herself into the air.

Even the oldest ursas couldn't fly. Gravity rounds were a foolproof way to buy time for her semblance to recharge against grounded Grimm.

Or at least, they always had been. The ursa below her didn't even hesitate. It swiped out with its intact paw and ripped a thirty-foot tree from the ground, roots and all, flinging it at Ruby like a spear.

Ruby's eyes widened. That was _impossible_. It shouldn't have enough articulation in its paws to hold objects. And throwing things with any accuracy required specific primate musculature that a Grimm patterned after a bear shouldn't have.

The tree flew past her, missing by several feet, but the ursa was already grabbing another. This time it threw the tree sideways, so a larger surface was coming at her, although it still looked like it would miss.

Ruby didn't wait around to see what it thought up next. She fired another gravity round, aiming herself back toward the clearing.

Her semblance still wasn't up. Sometimes it was back in seconds, sometimes it took over a minute. She'd never managed to work out a pattern.

She landed hard in the clearing, rolling to break her fall but unwilling to spend another gravity round to slow down.

The white-haired girl was still standing there, rapier out in front of her, pointed at the hole in the tree line where the ursa had barreled through.

She wasn't even looking at Ruby, just staring intently at the toppled trees and torn-up ground.

Sure enough, the ursa hurtled out of the same hole bare seconds later. It was already running more smoothly on its injured leg.

The girl let out another burst of activated ice dust, straight at the beast, but the monster banked hard and dodged it. Ruby had no idea how she'd caught it before. Maybe the same way, and it was too smart to be caught out twice.

Her uncle had told her, he'd _told her_ , that older Grimm were dangerous because they were so much more intelligent. She'd believed him, of course, but she'd believed him on a rational level. She was quickly acquiring a visceral understanding that she needed to treat this thing like a real opponent.

The ursa was charging at her again. 200 feet. 150. She breathed deep and readied Crescent Rose. She'd use more gravity shots if she had to.

The girl flourished her rapier, and an impossibly intricate pattern of glowing white lines materialized in the air behind her. An instant later, she was flying forward, a white blur. Another glyph appeared under her once she was between Ruby and the ursa, her speed vanishing the instant she touched it.

The ursa reared, surprised but not caught off-guard, and swiped at her with its enormous claw.

 _No!_ screamed a voice in the back of Ruby's head. Her semblance still wouldn't activate, but she sprinted forward anyway, determined to do what she could.

As the ursa's paw descended, the girl brought up her thin rapier, and another glyph appeared, this one colored blueish green. The Ursa's claw slammed into it and _bounced off_. The creature was thrown off balance, tumbling to the girl's side and rolling over and over on the dirt until its momentum was exhausted.

Ruby didn't quite believe her eyes. That was cyan dust, it had to be. Nothing but a cyan energy shield could take a blow like that without moving even a millimeter. But that was the sort of tech you saw on Atlassian dropships, not the kind of thing a teenage girl could produce on demand in the middle of a forest.

What was this girl's deal?

The ursa was struggling to find its feet. The girl turned, her face still locked in that neutral mask, and after a few seconds of buildup issued another ice burst.

Her target slammed its paw into the ground, throwing up a screen of dust and rocks. It _really_ didn't want to be trapped again, apparently. The ice blast impacted the cloud of debris, solidifying early and falling to earth as an enormous spiky snowball.

The ursa turned its attention back to Ruby, finally getting its feet under it. They made eye contact, and the creature's eyes flared a noxious yellow-red, so bright it made her eyes burn.

Ruby realized she was still running straight at the beast, and exactly how stupid that was. She had over half her aura, enough gravity rounds to get out of its range, an ally, and her semblance coming back online any second now - but in that moment of eye contact, she wondered, just for a second, if she was going to die.

The beast bared its teeth at her, and some utterly irrational feeling in the back of her mind told her it was smiling at the thought.

Maybe that was the push she needed, or maybe her semblance's inscrutable timer was just up, but Ruby felt her fear and anger mix into the calm stream of thoughts from the part of her mind that was still trying to figure out how to win this fight, the conglomeration washing over and through her, the world slowing down to a pace she could handle.

It wasn't the strongest surge she'd ever felt, but it was pretty darn good.

She probably had a few subjective minutes. She had to end this now.

She waded through the thick air until she reached the nearly-stationary Grimm, and began to take it apart with surgical precision.

First she removed its other paw, knowing ahead of time that she'd need to kick it off.

Next she leaped into the air, driving the point of crescent rose deep into its left eye socket.

It got less than six inches in before stopping.

This thing had bones in its _brain_?

Ruby withdrew the blade and started the chamber in Crescent Rose rotating, swapping out her gravity rounds for something more appropriate.

While that happened, she ducked underneath its bulk, running toward its hindquarters while drawing Crescent Rose along its underbelly.

When she made it to the legs, she swung Crescent Rose in a vicious arc, driving his point straight into the back of the creature's left knee.

It sank in easily, not managing to pierce the kneecap, but doing a lot of damage. She twisted it as she drew it out, leaving behind a gory mess of torn muscle and severed ligament. She did the same to the other knee.

She glanced down at its feet, but the thing's legs were almost twice the diameter of its arms. Not worth the effort.

She made sure to cut another gash in its underbelly as she returned to the creature's front. They might end up having to bleed it out.

Crescent Rose's chamber finished rotating, explosive rounds ready to fire.

She had a little extra time, so she hopped up on top of it. The armor around its neck and head looked close to impenetrable, but there were a few patches of plain black near the middle of its back.

She swung Crescent Rose like a pick, driving the point as deep as she could into any spot of black she could see, trying to hit the spine. One of them felt like it might have connected.

She decided not to double-check. Her semblance was still holding, but she didn't want to push her luck. She ran back to the beast's front, leaping off its mask, and planting herself a ways away, facing it head-on.

It might have been her imagination, but it seemed like the world was moving just a little bit faster.

She drove Crescent Rose into the ground, using the scythe blade to stabilize the barrel, and looked down his sights at the beast's mask. _Wrong, wrong, wrong_ a voice in the back of her head cried as the creature's face filled her entire vision. _It's wrong for it to be here._

She pushed her semblance, just the tiniest bit, enough that she could squeeze off three shots in rapid succession without internal friction foiling her. A handful of rose petals fluttered out of her barrel in the wake of each shot.

Her aim was almost perfect. The first bullet hit the beast's left eye, passing through effortlessly. The resulting explosion had already started to ricochet around inside whatever messed-up bone-filled skull the creature had when the second bullet reached it. The movement from the explosion screwed up her aim a little, but the right eye was big enough that the second bullet still passed inside.

The third had been aimed down its gullet, but the head had moved enough by the time it got there that it ended up hitting the lower jaw instead.

Yup, the world was _definitely_ speeding up. Ruby started Crescent Rose rotating back to gravity rounds, in case she needed to make a quick escape, then dashed back, putting herself about two hundred feet from the creature, directly away from the girl in white.

If she'd underestimated this thing again, and it charged at her, maybe the other girl could catch it from behind with one of those blasts.

Time snapped back to normal. The creature roared again, its vocal cords straining until it was almost a screech, as its body erupted in a dozen sprays of blood. Its back legs crumpled, driving it to the ground, where it thrashed mindlessly.

The ursa was still moving, but either it was too hurt to function, or Ruby had managed to knock out its higher brain functions with her explosive rounds.

The other girl leaped over the barrier of ice-encrusted dirt, directly at the ursa. Confusion flashed across her face as she saw the state it was in, and she created another glowing glyph in mid-air, changing her direction. She landed about fifty feet from it, pointed her rapier, and after a brief pause where nothing seemed to be happening, activated ice dust shot through the air.

The creature had no chance of dodging, and its lower body was quickly enveloped. The girl fired another blast, then another, totally encasing everything except the head.

The beast couldn't move an inch. It couldn't even seem to draw the air to bellow, its death noises shrinking to a hideous whine.

Ruby approached, cautiously.

The girl shot her a brief glance, but kept her eyes trained on the ursa. She seemed remarkably composed given the circumstances.

"What did you do to it?" she asked. Her voice was melodic and articulate, with just the tiniest hint of a whine to it. It sounded like the voice of someone halfway done growing up from a bratty kid into a refined young lady.

"Removed the other front paw at the joint, or slightly above it, mangled the insides of both knees, carved open a handful of arteries in its belly, hopefully punctured its spine, and detonated 20 grams of dirty burn dust inside its skull. Er, or the parts of its skull accessible through the eyes, anyway."

There was a pause, where neither of them seemed to know what to say. The beast continued its struggles from the head up.

"What's 'dirty' burn dust?" the girl asked, in a conversational tone.

"Burn dust with an unusually large quantity of contaminants, usually heavy metals. Not really safe to use as a propellant, but fine as a payload and slightly cheaper. Er, fine as a payload against Grimm. Using it against humans is considered a war crime under the great treaty. Nasty stuff. I salvaged a bunch of it from-"

"Fascinating." the girl interrupted her, sounding slightly annoyed.

Ruby realized she was rambling. She was a little wound up.

"What I meant to ask, though," the girl continued, "is whether 20 grams of dirty burn dust is anywhere close to as energetic as 20 grams of regular burn dust, and if so, why this thing is _still moving_."

"Um..." Ruby began. Things felt awkward now. "Yeah. It's a lot of energy. The inside of this thing's head is weird, though. I tried stabbing it in the eye, and I hit bone a few inches deep. I think it might have some sort of segmented brain structure. Its bone structure is fascinating, actually. It seems like it started with a normal ursa exoskeleton, but then the bones specialized as they grew. The bones on its arms grew into weapons, see, but the bones on its upper back grew into a defensive cage, even though they both started out the same. And the internal bones are larger too. I wonder if-"

The girl glanced at her again, briefly, and Ruby shut up.

"Of course," the girl said. "Obviously you had time to vivisect the damned thing. Do you think it will die on its own?"

"Er..."

Ruby had no idea, actually. You were supposed to be able to bleed Grimm out, if nothing else worked, but between the headmaster's warning yesterday and the surprises she'd already had from this thing, she wasn't prepared to assume.

Ruby briefly considered just leaving it here, trapped, but she couldn't stomach it. This thing was almost done, and something inside her demanded they finish the job.

She realized she'd been silent for an awkwardly long time.

"Well...most likely it will bleed out, but I don't think we should rely on that. This thing could kill a student."

"I agree." The girl nodded. "If you would do the honors?"

Even Ruby could tell that "honors" in that sentence meant "dirty work", but she didn't mind.

She stepped over to the thing's head, considering how best to go about it. Honestly, there was no point overcomplicating things. She had as much time as she needed to saw through the bone and decapitate it the old-fashioned way.

"Could you freeze the head, as well? I want to saw through the back of the neck."

The girl huffed. "I don't have an unlimited supply of dust here, you know. I didn't realize I was going to be going on a multi-day excursion this morning."

Ruby wasn't sure how to respond to that. After a few moments, though, the girl sighed and obligingly froze the head, leaving just the back of the neck exposed. That was an _impressive_ amount of control. Ruby was burning to ask her about it, but...

Priorities.

She put her hand on the base of the smaller blade at the back of Crescent Rose's head, tripping the quick-release with a thought, leaving her holding a long knife. With another thought, the smooth blade retracted, and a serrated one extended instead.

She knelt down before the cage of supernaturally hardened bone and got to work.

~o~O~o~O~o~

Ruby was embarrassed to admit that the beast had surprised her one last time. After sawing through the protective bone casing and entirely removing the ursa's head from its body, it was still twitching.

Turns out the ursa's bones weren't the only things which had proliferated as it aged.

The creature's brain was segmented, like she'd suspected, divided into nodules no more than six inches across. Each nodule was surrounded by a thick wall of bone, the only opening a cavern that wound back and forth inside the wall, eventually letting a thin bundle of neural tissue pass through.

There was a big cluster of nodules in the head, obviously, but there were more in a column that extended two feet down the spine. The creature clearly had trouble functioning with the head nodules destroyed, but just the spinal section seemed to be enough to keep it breathing and thrashing.

Ruby took some pictures as she worked, documenting the structure. Maybe this was a common thing among Grimm, but maybe not; she'd check with someone later just in case it was useful.

Was this why Grimm got more intelligent as they aged? Their brains metastasized inside of them, like some sort of horrible cancer, making them harder to fell, and also, purely by accident, smarter?

It took Ruby nearly half an hour to destroy the entire brain. She couldn't even use her semblance, since the work was so boring.

If Crescent Rose could transform into a drill, she would've been done in five minutes. In general it would be nice to have some way of getting through thick bone plates. Drills were impractical for most hunters, since the target needed to be stationary for them to work, but with her semblance...huh. That was a surprisingly good idea, actually. She pulled out her scroll and made a quick note of it.

When the beast finally fell still, Ruby didn't believe it for a moment. She paused in her work, holding her breath, looking for any sign of movement.

There was nothing. It was done.

Something welled up inside her, joyous and satisfied, so bright and strong she almost teared up. Hunting Grimm was always satisfying, but _this_ , it was like...

It was like...

She sat there for a while, soaking in the feeling, every part of her down to her very soul resonating in perfect harmony with the monster's end.

Eventually, Ruby heard the sound of a throat clearing. She looked up to see the white-haired girl staring at her. The girl looked significantly more concerned right now than she had when the ursa was charging her. There was another moment of awkward silence.

~o~O~o~O~o~

 **Interlude: Weiss**

Something was very wrong with this girl. Either she was rambling like a lunatic about things that didn't matter, or she was standing around in awkward silence. No in-between. It was unsettling.

Weiss had tried a little bit of banter, but it had all fallen flat. She'd tried poking a little fun, implying she was going to let the girl handle finishing the thing all on her own, and the nutjob had just started doing it.

She'd watched the girl saw through bone and flesh for half an hour, never pausing, except to take pictures of the damned thing, and never saying a word. Never looking unhappy, not even when she was shoulder-deep in the ursa's torso and the blood had permeated through her aura to stain her skin and clothes. Hell, she didn't even seem to notice that she was soaked. It wasn't normal.

And when she was done? She just kept sitting there, not saying anything, not making any eye contact, not a care in the world.

Weiss took a deep breath, centering herself.

She was falling into emotional thought patterns. She reached for her lessons, finding the cold clarity that Winter had worked so hard to impart.

She found the girl off-putting, but she couldn't let that strong subjective feeling dominate her decision-making.

They'd made eye contact. That was potentially problematic.

Was the girl an acceptable partner?

What did she even want in a partner?

She wanted someone strong. Check.

She wanted someone pliable. Uncertain, but the girl seemed agreeable enough, and willing to do unpleasant tasks.

She wanted someone loyal. Hard to tell beforehand, but the girl _had_ jumped in to help. She certainly wasn't a selfish opportunist.

Everything else was negotiable. If she hated spending time around the girl, well, that was fine. She'd hate it, suck it up, and do it anyway. That was practically the Schnee motto.

The only real problem was that the girl might well be mentally unstable. Insanity was dangerous, and hard to account for, especially when it came with an aura attached.

Weiss cleared her throat, getting the girl's attention. The girl looked up at her, and Weiss searched her face, looking for anything that might be a hint.

Nothing.

This line of thought was pointless. Weiss had very real reservations about the girl as a partner, but what were her options? Withdraw her application? Attempt to strong arm the girl into withdrawing hers? They would be graded as a pair for initiation, now, so she couldn't even attempt to sabotage her.

Looking at it objectively, the girl's drawbacks as a partner just weren't severe enough to justify any of the costly methods of acquiring another partner that Weiss had available. If she was insane, well, surely Beacon had dealt with that problem before. Huntresses weren't the most stable people.

"Well," she finally said, all too aware of the hesitation in her own voice, "I guess we should introduce ourselves, if we're going to be partners."

~o~O~o~O~o~

 **Author's Notes:**

 **1\. The next update will also be on Saturday.**

 **2\. Weiss is probably one of the characters whose personality is going to differ most from canon. I realize this is a turn-off for some people, but I hope you'll keep reading. I promise it's going somewhere.**

 **3\. If you like or dislike the interludes, please let me know. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do them.**

 **4\. If you liked or disliked the combat scene, please let me know. I don't usually write long combat scenes, so this is sort of new territory for me.**


	6. 1․6 Reunion

There was a stream just nearby, and Weiss insisted that they get Ruby cleaned up before someone mistook her for a serial killer.

Ruby hadn't wanted to. She'd already wasted so much time, and now she needed to start looking for Jaune all over again. But if she was honest, a ten minute delay wouldn't matter _that_ much. It had been hours since they'd landed in the forest. If Jaune was still OK after all this time, he would probably still be OK in another ten minutes. He was with Pyrrha Nikos, after all.

Besides, she really, really, _really_ didn't want to get off on the wrong foot with her new partner. First impressions were important, and even a small improvement in their rapport over their whole careers might save a huge number of lives in expectation.

No, wait, she was doing that thing Yang told her not to do again. She was actually just scared that the girl wouldn't like her. Maybe the other thing was true too, but it wasn't her actual motivation.

Ten minutes, round trip. It made her stomach twist up a bit, but she could spare that.

"What are you in such a hurry for, anyway?" Weiss asked, leaning against a tree while Ruby scrubbed as fast she could.

"I need to find Jaune." Ruby replied, distracted. "He might need help. I was trying to track him, but I ended up finding you by mistake."

"Jaune?" Weiss asked, sounding confused. "The idiot you and Nikos went flying off after? Do you know him?"

"He's not an idiot!" Ruby snapped, whipping her head around to look at Weiss. "Why would you even say that? He could be _dead_."

Oh dear. She might be a little on edge.

Weiss looked back at her, wrinkling her nose. "Did you not see his face? He _knew_ something like that was going to happen. And he told professor Ozpin, directly, to launch him anyway. In my book that makes him an idiot."

Ruby couldn't seem to say anything. She didn't know whether to be angry or confused. How could anyone think like that?

She must care whether Jaune lived or died. Surely she did. You couldn't be a human being and not care whether someone was killed in front of you.

A feeling bubbled up inside Ruby, anger and refusal and disgust. Something familiar but hard to place.

Weiss stood up from the tree, her body a little bit tense. Ruby realized her own hands were balled up, gripping big fistfulls of her skirt's fabric. She had no idea what her face looked like.

Weiss' face was neutral and expressionless, like a pale white mask.

That was enough to make the connection. Ruby recognized the feeling now. A tiny voice in the back of her head whispered, softer than she'd ever heard it: _She's wrong._

Ruby's face flushed with shame. That feeling wasn't meant for people. Never, never, _never_ for people. Not even the worst of the worst, let alone the girl in front of her who had made all of two callous remarks about a boy she didn't know.

Ruby's hands relaxed at her sides, and she turned away from Weiss. She resumed scrubbing with hard, angry strokes.

"Give me another minute or two, then we should move." she said, voice sounding more normal than she felt. "There are probably Grimm on the way."

~o~O~o~O~o~

They used Weiss' glyphs to leave the river at speed before any Grimm could arrive. Weiss would never have been able to keep up if Ruby used her semblance, and the smaller girl outright refused to let Ruby carry her.

There had been a moment, when it came time to leave, where Ruby thought the other girl might refuse to come along at all. But in the end they'd stayed together.

Ruby was trying hard not to think about what had happened. She was pretty sure, now, that she'd _scared_ Weiss. What sort of huntress scared people? But if she spent too long dwelling on that, she knew how she would start to feel, and the Grimm would be on them again.

They stopped a mile or so away from the river. Small beads of sweat stood out on Weiss' forehead, and she was breathing heavily. Those glyphs had to be her semblance, but apparently using them was somewhat taxing on a physical level, which was strange.

Ruby was burning with curiosity about so many things she'd seen in the fight. But it was always at least a little bit rude to ask someone about their semblance, and given their last interaction...

Weiss turned to look at her, and Ruby looked down at her shoes, fiddling with the hem of her clothes, unable to meet the girl's eyes. She heard Weiss sigh.

"Ruby..." the other girl began, hesitant.

Ruby's stomach tightened.

"I'm sorry."

Weiss sounded like she was biting down on a lemon as she said it. Ruby looked up at her, surprised, and saw that the other girls' mouth was pinched tight. Weiss closed her eyes, taking a deep breath through her nose. Her voice sounded oddly stiff.

"I think we just had what you would call a cultural misunderstanding," Weiss continued. "Since coming to Vale I've been surprised, over and over again, by how similar it is to Atlas. The CCT system really has brought the four kingdoms closer together. But those similarities make it easy to forget that there are also important differences."

Ruby was very confused at this point. There was no way Atlas as a civilization didn't believe in the value of human life. That couldn't be sustainable, could it?

"Every kingdom," Weiss said, "needs to control the spread of negative emotions to keep the Grimm at bay. Here in Vale, there is a strong social norm that certain upsetting topics simply aren't mentioned, or are only discussed very carefully. This social norm is especially strong around death. Operating in this framework, what I did was inappropriate. I discussed Jaune's situation in a way which upset you, hurting you and endangering both of us.

"In Atlas, things are reversed. There is a very strong social norm that you should never become upset, no matter what topic is broached, or in what manner. Citizens are considered responsible for their own emotional state, and are expected to learn coping strategies that allow them to remain calm and engage intellectually, even in very stressful situations. It is probably hard for you to imagine, but in Atlas, the way you responded when I called Arc an idiot would be considered just as inappropriate as my next words seemed to you."

Ruby blinked. That...made perfect sense, on an intellectual level. Those were both very reasonable coping strategies.

On an emotional level, she was still mad about what Weiss had said.

But maybe Weiss was feeling the same way? That Ruby had been indescribably, inexcusably rude?

Except she'd been big enough to look at it objectively, see where Ruby was coming from, and apologize?

Ruby cast her eyes back down. "I'm sorry too." she said in a small voice. "I shouldn't have...well..."

"No, it's my fault." Weiss said, rather insistently. "I'm the one abroad in a foreign kingdom. I even read up on the cultural differences, to avoid mistakes exactly like this one, and then entirely failed to apply what I learned."

"I still shouldn't have reacted like that," Ruby replied. "I could tell you were scared, for a second."

"I wasn't _scared_ ," Weiss sniffed.

That broke the tension, somehow, and Ruby giggled.

Weiss smiled, looking oddly relieved. "Well, I guess you _do_ have a sense of humor in there somewhere," she said.

"Why would you think I didn't?" Ruby asked, confused.

Weiss' smile widened just a hair.

"No reason."

~o~O~o~O~o~

Weiss and Ruby sat together in the tallest boughs of a tree. Ruby had Crescent Rose's scope pressed to her face again, scanning the treetops for nevermore.

Hopefully Jaune was still close enough for the Grimm to find him. Otherwise, well...she'd probably think of something.

From one perspective, Grimm spotting was incredibly boring. But from another perspective, it left her more than enough spare mental energy to talk, at least until it was time to quiet her emotions.

"Soooooo..." Ruby said slowly, getting Weiss' attention. "How do people in Atlas feel about being asked how they managed to manifest a stable cyan energy shield without a multi-ton regulator?"

Weiss chuckled. That was good.

"They feel fine about _asking_. You should feel free to ask me anything. As long as the question is in good faith, you literally can't offend me."

Ruby whistled.

"That's a pretty broad mandate."

Weiss moved somehow on the branch, but Ruby couldn't see what she was doing with the scope pressed to her only open eye.

"Yes, it is. Please hold me to it."

Weiss didn't seem like she was going to say anything more. Ruby didn't want to push, but...

"What _can_ you tell me? I know we just met, but if we're going to be fighting together, anything would be helpful. I can go first, if you want."

"Hm. No, that's fine. How much do you know about the Schnee?"

"Um...basically nothing? I know it's the name of a big dust company."

Weiss sighed. "Well, I suppose that's what I signed up for by going abroad. I can tell you what's publicly known, at least.

"The Schnee family is very, very, very old. We've managed a large fraction of the dust industry on the continent of Solitas for so long that historians disagree on what century we started.

"Let's see. I assume you at least know about the assimilation, right?"

"Yup," Ruby replied. "Er, what we're told here is that the king of Mantle tried to ban all forms of self-expression, hoping it would reduce the population's levels of negative emotions. Which sounds so silly that I'm sure there's more to it."

"There is," Weiss said, a little bit of irritation creeping into her voice. "First of all, it wasn't a measure taken lightly. There was an...incident. I don't know all the details, but the situation was dire.

"Also, the goal wasn't to limit the negative emotions of the population. Or maybe that was part of it, but it wasn't the main goal."

"What was the main goal, then?" Ruby asked.

"I can't say. Class 1 restricted information."

Ruby had no idea what "class 1 restricted information" was - whether that was an Atlassian thing, or whether it was the kind of thing she wasn't supposed to learn about until she was initiated - but she certainly wasn't going to bring that up right now.

"In any case, the Schnee rose from powerful to dominant during the assimilation, mostly due to the efforts of my great grandfather. I assume you also know why there are so few hunters and huntresses, yes? Why we don't just activate everyone's aura?"

Ruby nodded. "The exclusivity of exceptionality. They teach us that in grade school, here. 'If everyone's special, then nobody is.' Our semblances are the physical manifestation of what makes us special. The more hunters and huntresses there are, the less powerful they tend to be. There's some sort of geographic component, too, I think? Or maybe it's based on population sizes? Somehow it matters how many hunters and huntresses exist in your kingdom, not just how many exist in the world."

"Close enough. You can imagine, then, how monumental an event the assimilation was for the expression of aura in Mantle. The number of people who could plausibly be called special dropped precipitously. The number of newly activated auras fell and fell, until it was as low as its ever been since the age of heroes.

"This is also one reason why Mantle invested so heavily in technology. It allowed our large civilian population to protect itself from the Grimm without the need for aura.

"But I'm getting sidetracked again. The point is, during this period where semblances were rare, and thus potent, the Schnee family was growing tremendously powerful even while eliminating every last trace of individuality in its members."

"Wait," Ruby interrupted, shocked. " _Your_ family was assimilated?"

"Of course. Everyone was. In Mistral the assimilation was something imposed on the lower classes, but in Mantle, it was for everyone. It was a new way of life. You've heard of the Atlassian rules of etiquette? Those all have their roots in the assimilation. Everyone was trying to speak the same, dress the same, act the same, have the same hobbies and the same conversations...

"Most of the glyphs I use were developed during that period, when the Schnee semblance was at its height. Things are harder, now, and some parts of the semblance have been lost to us entirely, but I'm still standing on the shoulders of giants."

"Wait, hold on," Ruby said. "I really don't follow. Why does it matter how powerful your granddad's semblance was during the assimilation? Is yours similar enough that he could help you learn to use it?"

"Oh," Weiss said, sounding surprised. "When you said you knew basically nothing, you meant _basically nothing_. I shouldn't have assumed.

"Ruby, the thing that makes me special is the exact same thing that made my grandfather special, or my great grandfather, or my sister, or anyone else in my family. We're all special because we're Schnees, so we all have the same semblance."

Ruby's brain hiccuped. _What?_

She looked up from her scope at the girl beside her.

That could _happen_?

Weiss was just sitting there, totally nonchalant. If she was messing with Ruby, she had the best poker face in the world.

"Huh. That's...fascinating..." Ruby said, working through the implications. "I want to know more about that later, but can you share anything more tactically relevant? What does your semblance even _do_? Not, like, all the details. I just want to know roughly what to expect, the same way you know to expect that I'll be moving very fast in very short bursts."

Weiss turned on the branch, looking away from Ruby as she leaned back against the trunk. Ruby hoped she was just thinking about what to say, and not upset or something.

After almost a minute, Weiss spoke, the words sounding rehearsed. She must have been checking and double-checking them in her head.

"I draw glyphs with my semblance, allowing me to regulate the expression of activated dust. Each glyph regulates the expression in a different, specific way. These glyphs are hard to learn, and even harder to create, especially for my generation. I still only know a few. Some of these glyphs are multipurpose, working with different kinds of dust to achieve different effects. Others, like the cyan shield you saw, are more narrow. Either way, they all depend on dust to function. No dust, no semblance."

Weiss seemed to be done. Ruby knew she wasn't getting the full story. When Weiss had fired her blast of ice at the ursa, there hadn't been any visible glyphs. And none of this explained why repeated use of the white glyphs had been making her sweat. But even Ruby knew better than to push more right now.

"Thank you." Ruby said, meaning it. "I won't repeat any of that. Your semblance sounds really powerful, Weiss. Maybe you didn't need my help against that ursa at all."

"Almost certainly not," Weiss said, deadpan. "My semblance happens to be _very_ well suited to fighting a single powerful opponent. But I appreciate the effort."

Ruby stifled a giggle. She wondered if Weiss realized how blithe she sounded, sometimes.

"How did you end up fighting that thing, anyway?" she asked. "You don't exactly seem like you're prone to bursts of negative emotion. Was it just bad luck that it stumbled across you?"

Weiss' expression darkened.

"Oh, right. I forgot to tell you about that. Hmph. It's a little embarrassing, actually."

"What happened?"

"You remember that stream near the clearing? It has a rocky bed. The damned thing somehow taught itself to take the larger rocks and smash them together. It sounded enough like gunshots that I went to investigate. I don't know why it bothered, but it lured me several miles to that clearing before ambushing me."

Ruby took a few seconds to process that. She swallowed, slowly, then put the scope back to her face, resuming her search for a suitable nevermore.

She was starting to understand exactly why Ms. Goodwitch had been so cross to find her in the woods after dark.

~o~O~o~O~o~

There _was_ someone else near enough for the forest's Grimm to sense, but tracking them was slow going. With two people, it was harder to quiet their negative emotions enough to make the Grimm look elsewhere, but they managed.

Slowly, they began to close on their target, Weiss' glyphs letting them cover ground significantly faster than their quarry, even if she needed to rest for a while after repeated use. They talked as they went, both of them clearly making an effort to fill the otherwise slightly-awkward silence. By the time they'd gotten within a mile or two of their target, Ruby was starting to feel a little more comfortable with her new partner, or at least she didn't find herself wondering after every other sentence whether Weiss secretly hated her.

There were no telltale sounds of battle to follow this time, so it came as a surprise when Ruby and Weiss burst out of a particularly thick patch of forest to find themselves on the banks of a wide river, with a pair of human figures juuuust visible, less than half a mile away.

Ruby's heart leapt, the sudden excitement whirling together with her pent up frustration and stress, the mixture washing her right out of normal time and into her own personal world.

She took off running. Weiss might be upset about being left behind, but she _had_ to see if Jaune was alright, she had to.

It was definitely him. Even from this distance, she could see that one figure was bright white, shining in mid-afternoon sun, and the other was a golden-red. It wasn't hard to put two and two together.

As she drew closer, she started to get a little confused. Jaune was _standing up_. She'd seen both his legs get broken. That was a hard injury to normalize away in the best of circumstances, and if his aura had been exhausted just this morning, there was no way he could've recovered it by now...

Her confusion was crowded out by her relief, though. He seemed fine. He seemed _fine_.

As Ruby approached, the strangest thing started to happen. Her time dilation started to go a little bit wonky. Her semblance began to struggle, but unevenly; her aura was moving her hands just fine, but her midsection was a little bit sluggish, and Crescent Rose suddenly felt like a heavy anchor on her back.

It was almost exactly like the sensation she got in duels, when her semblance interacted with someone's aura, the two self-images disagreeing on how the world should be, vying for dominance.

Ruby remembered, then, that among Pyrrha Nikos' many mysterious powers was the ability to interfere with speedsters. It was sort of a necessity, if you wanted to succeed in the dueling circuit, that you have some way of dealing with opponents significantly faster than yourself. In Pyrrha Nikos' case, when speedsters got too close to her - where "too close" conveniently meant "anywhere inside the octagon" - their semblances would start to stutter and fail, even before they touched her.

The sensation got stronger as Ruby got closer, until it changed qualitatively. Her time dilation stuttered, just for a moment, her ears filling with a whooshing noise as the sounds around her sped up and then back down. When her semblance recovered, it felt weak, like it would fade any moment. It stuttered again, and then stopped for good.

Ruby's feet tripped over themselves, the random time fluctuations throwing off her stride. Long years of practice - more years than most people realized, with the way her semblance worked - kicked in, and she managed to somersault back to her feet, running a couple more steps before skidding to a stop behind the pair.

Or, behind Jaune, rather. Pyrrha Nikos had swung around while she tumbled, and as she skidded to a stop, Ruby found herself staring directly into the barrel of Milo.

Several thoughts ran through her head, in quick succession.

 _Jaune is OK!_

 _Is she going to shoot me?_

 _Oh my god, that's the real Milo!_

 _What happened to my semblance?_

 _Jaune!_

 _Her reactions are insane. Those can't be natural._

Ruby finally looked up from the muzzle of the gun to see the redheaded girl blinking at her in confusion.

"Um..." Ruby said shyly. "Hi!"

"Hello." Pyrrha said back, not lowering Milo even an inch.

Jaune had turned around by this point, a little slow on the uptake, and his face lit up when he saw her.

"Ruby!" he said with a smile.

"Jaune!" she said back.

Pyrrha Nikos looked back and forth between them. Finally, she put Milo away, smoothly sheathing him behind her back.

Ruby normally would have been drooling over the sword-javelin-shotgun, but she was distracted.

Jaune was OK. He looked _more_ than OK. He had a sort of healthy glow she hadn't seen in him before, although maybe that was the light, or the exercise, or just what anyone would look like after surviving what he went through.

"You're..." Ruby said, a tiny hitch in her voice. "You're OK?"

Jaune's face fell a little, growing more somber. "I'm OK, Ruby. I'm sorry for-"

"You're really, truly OK?" Ruby interrupted him. "Your aura's working again?"

Jaune and Pyrrha shared some sort of look. Jaune smiled again. "Never better."

That was enough for Ruby. She tackled him in a hug, arms wrapping around his torso as her shoulder drove into his stomach like a linebacker, taking him to the ground with an "oof".

~o~O~o~O~o~

 **Author's Notes:**

 *** Thanks to** **Appliciousness for beta.**

 *** The next update will be on Sunday. We'll find the correct day eventually!**

 *** This is the second big infodump I've done, the first one being at the start of Chapter 2, and I'm curious how people feel about them. Are they enjoyable? Too slow? Too long? Too unnatural? Amazing world building that you now realize is exactly what you were missing in your life?**


	7. 1․7 Collaboration

"Ms. Nikos." Weiss said, arching an eyebrow as she stared straight down Milo's barrel.

Ruby had entirely failed to inform either Jaune or Pyrrha that Weiss existed. Predictably, the heiress had received the same welcome as Ruby when she dashed up to the pair on her glyphs moments later.

"Weiss Schnee." Pyrrha said back politely, sheathing Milo behind her back in exactly the same smooth motion as before. _Exactly_ the same, Ruby noticed.

Pyrrha looked back and forth between them, Weiss standing there with her arms crossed, Ruby still lying on top of Jaune on the ground. She put on a polite smile, hands on her hips.

"And...Ruby? I don't believe I've had the pleasure of meeting you yet."

Weiss shot Ruby a peeved look, reminded suddenly of the young girl's existence, and Ruby shrank a little. Yup, she was mad about Ruby running off.

Honestly, though, Ruby would do it again.

Oh, wait. Pyrrha was still waiting for an answer. _Pyrrha Nikos_.

"Um...hi!" Ruby said. Wait, she'd already said that. Um...

"You're really good at putting Milo away!" she squeaked. Why had she said that?

Pyrrha looked back at her, still smiling, but clearly confused. Ruby blushed, looking down, and she felt a hand land on her head, ruffling her hair.

Exactly two people in the world ruffled her hair - Yang and uncle Qrow - and they both did it to annoy her. This felt different, more of a pat and less of a noogie, which was good because Jaune was wearing rough leather gloves-

Ruby blushed even deeper, realizing she'd been hanging on to Jaune for uncomfortably long now. She zipped to her feet, hands behind her back, looking down at the boy.

Jaune was lying backward on his elbows, perfectly relaxed, clearly suppressing a laugh.

"Pyrrha, this is Ruby," he said, gesturing at her. "We met on the airship. Ruby, this is Pyrrha."

"Right!" Ruby said. "Nice to meet you Pyrrha."

She stuck her hand out, and Pyrrha shook it, looking slightly bemused.

Ruby would've thought she'd feel more awkward meeting someone famous, but she was so awkward in general that it actually felt pretty normal.

"Oh, and this is Weiss!" Ruby said.

"We've met," the three of them said, all at once.

Oh, right. She'd seen the three of them all talking under the tree before she'd left to hunt.

There was a moment of awkward silence. Jaune was still smiling, but was also rubbing the back of his head, looking maybe a little bashful. Weiss was glaring at him with her arms crossed. Pyrrha was looking back and forth between the two of them, still smiling politely. Oh, wait. Ruby recognized that smile. She'd seen Pyrrha wearing it a lot during press conferences.

Ruby felt like she was missing something.

Jaune stood up, dusting himself off.

"We should move along." Weiss said. "We're still on a time limit, and finding you two took a while."

Pyrrha turned to look at Jaune, raising her eyebrows.

"Oh, come off it." Weiss said. "Do you realize how much time Ruby spent tracking this idi...this guy down? She isn't about to let him out of her sight now. I'm stuck with her, and you're stuck with him, so let's get going."

What? Why would Pyrrha be...

 _Oh._ Ruby hadn't quite put two and two together on that one yet. In her defense, she'd been a little distracted.

Pyrrha Nikos as a partner...she couldn't decide whether Jaune was a very lucky man, or a very unlucky one.

Some of the small social cues she'd been getting since they arrived were starting to make sense. It reminded her uncomfortably of the way she felt when Yang's friends were around, actually. Was this how it was going to be now? Every time she saw Jaune, Pyrrha would be there, the two of them sharing significant looks she couldn't parse?

Aaaaaaaargh.

"We should obviously stick together," Jaune said, sounding surprised it was even a question. "We're all headed to the same place, and this forest is dangerous. Four is better than two."

"Not necessarily," Pyrrha replied. "Four people will attract more Grimm. And we'd be able to cover more ground in pairs. We could arrange a signal, so whoever finds the temple can alert the others."

"The whole forest is jammed," Ruby jumped in. "Both the CCT and the local mesh are down."

Pyrrha nodded. "I was thinking of a flare."

"If we do split up, it wouldn't make sense to pair me with Ruby," Weiss said, turning to look at Pyrrha. "We both have semblances that let us move quickly. I can bring at least one person along, and I suspect she can too. If I went with you, and Ruby went with Jaune, we'd be able to cover a lot more ground."

Pyrrha was still smiling politely, but it was starting to look more than a little forced, at least to Ruby's eye.

What was going on? Were they _fighting_? Over what?

"I think we should stay with our partners." Pyrrha said, voice chipper.

Ruby didn't like this, but she didn't even know what was going wrong, let alone how to salvage it.

"Let's hold on a minute," Jaune said. "We shouldn't start arguing over how to split up when we don't even know what we're doing yet. We have a lot of time here. We can afford to spend a little bit of it planning.

"And besides," Jaune continued, grinning, "I'm pretty sure we all skipped lunch. Why don't we eat an early dinner, talk things over, and figure out what to do next?"

~o~O~o~O~o~

The four of them sat in a circle on the side of the river, Ruby's cloak laid out like a picnic blanket, enjoying a surprisingly tasty dinner of fire-dust-roasted fish and a few energy bars Ruby had been keeping in her skirt pockets. Jaune had lost his pack in the fall, and nobody else had brought food, but Ruby's semblance made catching fish from the river trivial.

"Jaune," Weiss said in-between dainty bites, "I'm not just going to drop this. You need to tell us _something_. Your aura is clearly fine, better than average even, if it managed to normalize your mangled legs. But we can't ignore the fact that it didn't do a thing to stop the force of that catapult. When we run into more Grimm, we won't be able to fight effectively unless we know whether or not you can take a hit."

"Assuming we all stay together." Pyrrha interjected.

"Yes, " Weiss said, voice polite to the point of sarcasm, "thank you for the correction, Ms. Nikos. Assuming that."

"Just Pyrrha is fine," the tall girl said, smiling.

"Of course." Weiss said, smiling back.

"Weiss," Ruby said, "I don't think Jaune wants to talk about what happened."

Pyrrha nodded. "Why don't we just drop the subject?"

The smile fell off Weiss' face. She took another small bite, not breaking eye contact with Pyrrha.

Jaune swallowed the mouthful he was chewing, fishing a tiny bone out from between his teeth.

When he spoke, it sounded a little bit hesitant. "Look. Weiss, Ruby, I'll be as honest as I can be. I don't want to lie to either of you. That...isn't the sort of person I want to be. But that's exactly why I can't talk about it. I _can_ say that I don't expect what happened on the cliff to happen again."

Weiss kept pushing. "If her body language is anything to go by, Ms. Nikos here knows a lot more than we do. Why can't you extend us the same measure of trust?"

Pyrrha shifted a little. She didn't look _nervous_ , exactly, but Ruby could see what Weiss was picking up on.

"It isn't about _trust_ ," Jaune said, his voice firming up. "If it were up to me, I'd tell you everything you want to know, right now. But I can't. The only things Pyrrha knows are things she discovered in the process of saving my life after the fall, and I asked her to promise me she wouldn't talk about them. I'm sorry, but I won't say anything more about it."

If it were up to him? Who else was involved? Ruby was getting more confused, not less. It also bothered her, for some reason, that Pyrrha and Jaune had this shared secret now. Maybe Weiss felt the same way, and that's why she was pushing so hard?

"Hmph," Weiss said. "Fine. I suppose I can respect that. You're _sure_ it won't happen again?"

Jaune looked at Pyrrha, who nodded.

"It won't. Unless I run out of aura the normal way, of course." Jaune cracked a smile at that, but just the thought made Ruby feel like a heavy weight had settled in her stomach.

"Good enough, then." Weiss sniffed. "Just so long as you aren't a burden."

"I think Jaune will be able to pull his weight," Pyrrha said. "Assuming we all stick together, that is."

Weiss sighed, resting her head in her hands as if begging for patience.

Dinner had been nice, the four of them pooling resources and figuring out how to feed everyone, but the atmosphere was starting to feel a little tense again. Ruby fidgeted and looked at Jaune, but he wasn't paying attention to her.

Weiss spoke again, and when she did her tone was slightly more formal, the same way it had sounded when she'd apologized to Ruby earlier.

"I think maybe we should talk about things." she said. "There seems to be more than a little unspoken animosity here, and this really isn't the time or the place for social games. It doesn't seem fair to Ruby, even ignoring the fact that it's a distraction from the forest full of Grimm."

Pyrrha looked a little bit surprised at that, but Jaune nodded.

"I agree. I, uh, didn't want to bring it up just in case it made you uncomfortable..."

"I don't think you did anything wrong, Jaune." Pyrrha said.

"I won't comment on _that_ ," Weiss said, before Jaune could respond. "But I'm certainly not blameless. Incidentally, Pyrrha, I'm sorry if I've been sniping at you. It was stupid and defensive. I should've attempted to talk things out explicitly right away if I felt uncomfortable."

Pyrrha seemed a little taken aback, but she nodded, rubbing one arm with the other. "I'm...sorry too."

"Guuuuuys," Ruby whined, "What's going _on_?"

Weiss turned to her. "Another cultural misunderstanding, I suspect. The three of us had a rather mutually unpleasant social interaction earlier."

"What happened?"

"Well," Weiss said, looking around. "From my perspective, I attempted to have a conversation with Pyrrha, who I thought would be a useful ally to have at Beacon. I don't mean that to sound cold. I understand that friendships here are conceived of slightly differently, but I expected the relationship to be mutually beneficial.

"In any case, I attempted to have a conversation with Pyrrha, and was unable to because of frequent and crass interruptions from Jaune here. Once again, this is my perspective. I don't mean to imply that it's the only correct one, or that Jaune was being intentionally malicious. In any case, I grew somewhat irritated at these interruptions, and grew significantly more irritated when Pyrrha seemed to become angry at _me_ as a result. Although she tried to be polite about it, it seemed clear that she wanted me to go away.

"It seemed to me that Jaune was being incredibly rude, and that somehow I was being blamed for it. Worse, my potential relationship with Pyrrha, which I valued quite highly, was being damaged. I said some unkind things which I now regret, and here we are."

Weiss stopped talking and took another bite of her fish, glancing around. Pyrrha was looking up at the sky, polite smile still on her face, but Jaune was looking right at Weiss.

"Crass comments?" Ruby asked, looking at Jaune. She suspected this was a rather drastic sort of cultural misunderstanding; Jaune seemed like quite the gentleman, in her opinion.

Jaune rubbed the back of his head again, grinning a little awkwardly.

"I...well, um. Uh. First of all, Weiss, thank you for being, well, open to talking, I guess. I'm sure it wasn't easy."

"Easier than you might expect, actually. It's strange people don't do it more."

"Right. Anyway, I'd feel like a real jerk if I wasn't open back. From _my_ perspective, I was having a nice conversation with Pyrrha, I was happy and in a good mood, and then this other girl walks up, and, well..."

Was Jaune _blushing_?

"I happen to find this girl attractive. Not, like, I take leave of my senses or anything, but she's attractive, and, well...

"OK, promise not to laugh, but I don't really have much experience with girls. I mean, I grew up with sisters, but we didn't really live near many other people, and, um, I realized very quickly afterward that I _might_ have been taking some of the shows I grew up watching too literally, which was obviously stupid, because I _knew_ they were exaggerated, and I'm rambling now..."

Jaune coughed into his hand.

Ruby was having a little bit of trouble sorting through her emotions.

She felt something strange she couldn't unpack at the thought of Jaune being attracted to Weiss. She'd never really had a male friend before, and it was kind of weird to know one of her friends was attracted to one of her other friends. (If Weiss was even a friend yet.) She definitely felt sad that Jaune had gotten rejected, but she also felt relieved for some inexplicable reason.

She felt embarrassed for Jaune. Which was awful, she knew the last thing he probably wanted was everyone feeling embarrassed on his behalf, but there you go.

She felt an enormous amount of sympathy. Swap a couple of gender norms, and she could see herself giving the same blushing, rambling rant some day. Mixed with the sympathy, she felt a strange sort of reassurance. If even someone like Jaune could be this awkward sometimes, maybe there was hope for her.

She wanted to give him a hug, but she still felt sort of weird about the last one, and it seemed inappropriate right now.

"Anyway," Jaune continued, "I'm sorry I made you feel uncomfortable, Weiss. I didn't mean to, but it was still my fault."

"Apology accepted." Weiss said.

That seemed to settle that. All three of them turned to look at Pyrrha.

She was blushing too, oddly enough.

"Um..." she said.

There was a brief period of silence.

"I...I really hope this isn't rude." she said carefully, looking at Jaune a little nervously. "But, well, Weiss mentioned cultural misunderstandings before, and in Mistral, we don't really...that is, there are certain things we don't really talk about."

Pyrrha turned to look at Weiss.

"I feel guilty, because you were both so forthright, but I don't really..."

"That's perfectly fine," Weiss said, without missing a beat. "The goal here isn't some sort of quid-pro-quo exchange of emotional vulnerability, the goal is to get the group social dynamic into a healthy place. I don't understand why you became upset with me earlier, but if you don't feel like you can discuss it, I'm sure I'll be able to manage."

"I wasn't upset with _you_ ," Pyrrha said. "It was more that I was upset with...the situation. I don't feel like you did anything wrong, Weiss, at least before you tore into Jaune like that. And now I understand how you were feeling, at least."

Weiss nodded. "That's good enough for me. Is there anything else you'd like to resolve?"

Pyrrha shook her head, looking down at her lap. "No."

"OK." Weiss said. "Don't feel like that has to be final. If you change your mind, we can reopen this discussion later. Jaune, is there anything else you'd like to resolve?"

"No," he said. He seemed to have gotten his confidence back, looking Weiss right in the eye. "Weiss, thank you for doing this. It was...a little direct, maybe, but I think it was for the best."

Weiss nodded firmly, as if that settled everything. "Thank you. Alright, that was productive, but we should really move on to the main topic. Does anyone know how we might go about finding this temple?"

~o~O~o~O~o~

Ruby ran her fingers through the grass, trying to figure out how she could explain the thing she wanted to say. The grass was warm and dry from the sun. She closed her eyes, and she could just barely smell it between her fingers.

That meant nothing had grazed here recently. That strong, nostalgic smell everyone associated with grass was actually the smell of a freshly-cut lawn. When green leafy plants were ripped, whether by lawnmowers or grazing animals, they released a variety of chemicals to help the wound heal, some of which were volatile enough that they dispersed through the air and produced a strong smell.

It was amazing, when you thought about it, that you could tell whether grazing animals had been here hours or days ago, just by how the grass smelled. It was _amazing_. The world was so complicated, so insanely saturated with details, and all of them were connected.

That was what she wanted to explain. That everything was connected, and if they understood the world well enough, if they could just _see_ those connections, they could follow them right to the temple.

Just like how she'd followed the Grimm to Weiss, and then Jaune. She'd wanted to know whether Jaune was north of her or not. Well, how would the world look different in those two cases? What was connected to Jaune's location? Which of those were connected to her, or could be?

Because that's what the method of tracking was. A long string of connections between Jaune's location, the mysterious senses of the Grimm, that Grimm's attention, the way that attention shifted the Grimm's body, the way the light from the sun reflected off that body, the way the carefully crafted lens in her sniper scope focused the light into her retina, the way the activations of the rods and cones in her eye stimulated electrical patterns in her brain when enough of them were hit at once - and the connection was complete, Jaune's location and her thoughts, linked by a causal chain.

It was beautiful. The world was _beautiful_. It took her breath away, when she stopped to think about it, to pause and let the grandeur of it overwhelm her.

"Ruby?"

Jaune's voice interrupted her thoughts.

"Do you have any ideas?"

Oh. She'd sort of lost track of the conversation. The sense of majesty unraveled as she looked up, rejoining the conversation, but she didn't mind. She could have it back whenever she wanted.

"Oh! Um, sorry," she said, "I sort of lost track of the conversation."

"You didn't miss much," Weiss said.

"You looked like you were thinking about something," Jaune added, voice hopeful.

Ruby's heart began to beat a little faster. She'd always been good at puzzles. They could probably figure it out, if they looked at the problem the right way.

She didn't feel like she could explain how everything was connected, not in a way that would make sense, and she didn't want to ruin it, to mumble her way through an explanation and leave an ugly facsimile of what she saw in people's heads.

That was fine though. She'd just start working on the problem.

"I, um," she said, voice a little squeaky. "I kind of have a method for working through problems. Do you mind if we run through it, real quick, if we don't have any other ideas?"

"I don't see why not," Pyrrha said cheerfully.

The mood of the group wasn't fully healed. They weren't exactly acting like friends yet, but it was leagues better than it had been half an hour ago.

"OK," Ruby said. "First off, what do we know? Any details you can think of, no matter how unimportant. No analysis yet."

She got out her scroll to jot them down.

Pyrrha started to speak, but Weiss interrupted her, reciting as though from memory. "You will make your way north, fighting through the legions of Grimm which inhabit the forest, and attempt to locate an abandoned temple which was discovered here long ago. The temple is no more than a day's travel on foot, but getting there will be a challenge for most of you."

Ruby nodded, writing down the salient parts.

"There was more, though." she said.

Weiss frowned. "I don't think there was."

"Just off the top of my head," Ruby said, "he said we would 'delve' into it. He said we would retrieve one of the relics they had placed there. Ooh, he said they placed them in the inner sanctum. There might have been other things."

"Ah. I see what you mean," Weiss said, looking thoughtful.

"I'm afraid I don't," Pyrrha said, looking between them. "How does knowing what we need to do once we get there help us find it?"

"No analysis yet!" Ruby said. "Any other facts?"

They all thought for a moment.

"We know that multiple pairs will delve into the same temple," Jaune said. Ruby flashed him a smile and nodded, writing it down. Almost certainly useless, but he _understood_. The tiniest facts could turn out to be important.

"We also know, or can at least assume, that some reasonable number of people will pass initiation," Weiss added. "That rules out a surprising number of scenarios."

"No analysis yet!" Ruby said again.

"Er...we know that we were fired into the forest at random," Pyrrha said. "So our ability to find it doesn't depend on our starting position."

Ruby rolled her eyes, electing not to say that they weren't doing analysis yet for the third time, and wrote it down.

They went back and forth like this for a bit, until they were _really_ scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Ruby used that time to look at all the things they knew, sorting them into likely and unlikely leads.

"Alright," she finally said, " _now_ it's time for analysis. Let's start thinking implications. What does it mean that the place is a temple?"

There was silence for a bit, until Jaune said, hesitantly, "It means that people worshipped something there?"

Ruby nodded. "Mhmm, mhmm. And what does that mean?"

Weiss spoke this time: "It means it's _old_ , for one thing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the modern organized religions in Vale call their places of worship churches."

"I think that's right," Ruby said. "There might be cults that still build temples, but the building being old matches with Ozpin saying it was discovered long ago, and it being an important enough structure to use for initiation. And what does _that_ mean?"

"How old is 'old'?" Pyrrha asked. "I don't know much Valian history."

"Probably pre-kingdom era," Ruby said.

"That helps a lot, then," Pyrrha said. "Or, I think it does. At least in Mistral, almost everything build in the pre-kingdom era is somewhere in the mountains."

"Something similar is true in Vale," Ruby said, "although there's more variety in the geographic features people used to hide from the Grimm. I think caves were a popular choice. Older Grimm can't fit inside, and younger Grimm have trouble navigating them to find people."

"They'd need food," Jaune piped up. "And water. It was harder to transport things over long distances in the pre-kingdom era. It was a lot like the frontier is today."

Ruby cast her eyes out to the river, thinking.

"Probably not in the middle of a forest, then," Weiss mused.

"I was just thinking the same thing!" said Ruby excitedly. She flipped off of her notes and over to the maps on her scroll.

"Let's see," she said. "It looks like the forest abuts a mountain range to the northeast. There are only a few sources of freshwater, the largest of which is this river, although there might be snowmelt if it's high enough up."

"Food is a problem if you go _too_ high," Pyrrha said.

"If it's close enough to ground, they could just dig a well," Jaune added. "It's not that far down to the water table in most places."

This was amazing. Ruby didn't need to prod any more, she was having trouble integrating information as fast as they were generating it.

"Do you think we should pay attention to the word 'delve'?" Jaune asked.

"Absolutely," Ruby and Weiss said at the same time. They exchanged a look, and Weiss waved for Ruby to continue.

"Professor Ozpin chooses his words carefully," she said.

Weiss nodded firmly.

"In that case, it's probably underground. You don't exactly delve into the grounds of an open-air temple."

"But that means it could be anywhere," Pyrrha said, "even in the forest itself."

"Probably not deep in the forest," Weiss answered. "Having an 'inner sanctum' suggests that it's fairly large. With primitive transportation infrastructure, a large temple would require an even larger settlement nearby, and it can't all be underground. They'd need fields to grow crops, at the very least."

Ruby looked at the map again. "There are no terraces of arable land in the mountains like in Mistral, so they'd have to farm on the ground. If we're trying to find the people who lived near the temple, then we're probably looking for a cave system abutting a large tract of flat land. If we can find something that looks settleable, we can probably search for the actual temple entrance by hand."

Ruby frowned.

"These maps don't have enough resolution. Let's head north and see if we can find any karst. We can start with the area near where this river winds through the mountain range, maybe? That's probably the most likely place for a settlement."

There were nods all around. Ruby was starting to feel excited. Now that she knew Jaune was safe, she was finally able to relax and enjoy the actual initiation. She'd always found tests fun, and this one was no exception.

Although, now that she thought about it...

Ruby's stomach dropped out. She'd forgotten something very, very, very important.

Yang.

Was her sister OK?

Ruby felt a little bit of panic rising up, but she pressed it down, forcing herself to think.

Yang could take care of herself. She was probably fine.

But Ruby still wanted, no, _needed_ to make sure her sister was safe.

Finding Yang would be hard. Ruby had landed close to Jaune, but Yang could be anywhere in the forest.

Although...there was _one_ place she knew Yang would be headed, a single salient location they had both been connected to before they entered the forest. If Ruby's group got to the temple before anyone else, they could camp near the entrance and wait for Yang to show up.

Ruby set her mouth in a hard line, looking back at the map.

Maybe they could find the temple today, before the sun set.

~o~O~o~O~o~

 **Author's Notes:**

 *** Thanks to Appliciousness for beta.**

 *** The next update will be on Sunday again**


	8. 1․8 Darkness

"And you were worried we wouldn't find any caves," Jaune said, plopping down next to Ruby where she sat on the grass.

Ruby glanced up from her scroll. He'd probably meant it as a joke, but she didn't think it was very funny.

Their guess about the settlement had been spot on. They'd followed the river up toward the edge of the mountains, and they'd barely broken the treeline before encountering hints of it.

Ruby looked around, her eyes tracing over the barest remains of a fieldstone wall, past the mysterious rectangular slab embedded in the river's side - maybe there had been a water wheel, once? - all the way up to the edge of the mountain range. The orange light of the nearly-setting sun soaked the base of the mountain, casting dramatic shadows into the mouths of the hundreds of caves dotting its side far into the distance.

Apparently there was a lot of limestone in the area.

Jaune clapped a hand on her shoulder, and Ruby turned back to look at him.

"We don't have much daylight left," he said. "We need to start thinking about where to spend the night."

Ruby didn't want to stop. They were _so_ close.

She looked back at her scroll, flipping through the pictures she'd taken of the cave entrances. Most were boring, but some had crude markings chiseled outside the entrance. A few of the markings were easily interpretable, stick figures with sharp lines in their hands surrounding crude approximations of Grimm. Others were more abstract, or faded to almost nothing by the passage of time.

She stared hard at the pictures, trying to squeeze understanding from them by sheer force of will. There had to be a clue in there. Some pattern, some non-obvious interpretation, some clever angle where she'd squint just right and everything would resolve into a clear picture of who these people had been, how they'd lived, and where they would have put their _gosh-darned temple_...

"Ruby?" Jaune asked gently, squeezing her shoulder briefly and pulling her out of her thoughts.

She looked down and saw that her free hand was clutching the hem of her skirt, knuckles white, working the cloth back and forth, back and forth, repetitively.

She took a slow, deep breath, forcing her hand to relax. Her throat was tight, too, now that she was paying attention, and she had a kink in her back from sitting badly for too long.

Yang had made her promise, when she was younger, that she wouldn't try so hard to be perfect that she'd wrap around into being an idiot. Uncle Qrow had made her promise almost the same thing, years later. Her dad had never really _said_ anything to her, but at some point he'd started telling a very particular type of cautionary story once a month or so, when she just so happened to be in earshot.

She sighed, turning off the screen of her scroll, trying to wrench her brain onto a new track. She patted Jaune's hand, and he let go with one last friendly squeeze, leaving her free to stand and stretch.

"We should probably sleep in the caves," she said, turning to look them over. "We don't know what's in these woods, but if the caves worked for normal humans armed with spears, we should be safe too."

Jaune nodded, standing up. "Pyrrha and I thought the same thing. Maybe that one with the deathstalker carved on the front?"

Ruby considered. Now that she wasn't tunnel-visioning on the temple, there was a lot to consider. What was she even trying to accomplish?

Keep the four of them safe. Sleep well, replenish their aura. Meet up with Yang. Find the temple in the morning. Delve into the temple, retreive the relic, get back to the cliffs.

"Let's try to find one high up on the southwest face of the mountain range," she said, "If we keep a fire going, it should be visible from dozens, maybe hundreds of miles away. Yang might find us in the morning. We have at least an hour of light left, that should be more than enough time to gather firewood. We can cut some green wood, too, and smoke some fish so we have emergency provisions."

Ruby almost kicked herself. Smoke signals! It was so obvious. As soon as she knew the temple wasn't going to be trivial to find, she should've taken ten minutes to reassess, started a smoky fire going on the mountainside, and then continued looking.

They could set off some burn dust, too, in case anyone was in hearing distance. They probably had enough to spare. How could she have missed that? An _ursa_ had managed to figure out that loud bangs would attract Weiss. There was really no excuse.

Ruby shook her head, doing her best to discard the negative thoughts. That line of thinking wasn't productive, and might attract Grimm. She'd go over the initiation and think through her mistakes in detail once everyone was safely back in Beacon.

"Right," Jaune said with conviction. "Good thinking. Why don't you go get a start on the fish? I'll go find Weiss and Pyrrha."

~o~O~o~O~o~

Ruby was standing on the riverbank, flipping through the notes on her scroll in exasperation, when a white glyph appeared. Moments later, Weiss arrived in a blur, slamming to a stop beside her.

"Weiss!" Ruby said, relieved. "Quick. Say something interesting."

Weiss paused, mouth slightly open. She looked like she'd been about to say something, but hadn't managed to get it out in time.

"Excuse me?" she asked instead.

"I can't get my semblance to activate! I'm _almost_ in the right mental state, and it's even urgent since the sun's setting, but fishing gets _boring_ after a while, and I'm honestly kind of burnt out mentally, it's been a long day, and I need a little push, so say something interesting."

Ruby just managed to get the whole sentence out without taking a breath. She didn't have _time_ to be bored.

"O...kay?" Weiss said. "The crack of a whip is actually a very tiny sonic boom."

Ruby thought about it. That made sense. It was kind of interesting...

"Not like that. Something more stimulating."

Weiss rolled her eyes. "Like what?"

"Something _stimulating_."

"You already said that."

"Well, what do you want?"

"An example of something you'd find stimulating."

"That's what I want from _you_."

Weiss pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Look. What was the last stimulating topic you thought about?"

Ruby thought back. The real answer was the conversation with Weiss about the Schnee semblance, but Ruby didn't want to come across as prying.

"My sister and I talked about the end of Ozpin's speech, when he said that a hunter is someone who is allowed to be unhappy."

Weiss grimaced at that. "Ah, yes. My father warned me about that tendency of his."

"Tendency?"

"Hinting at things he really shouldn't be hinting at in public. I mean, he wasn't exactly shouting it from the rooftops, but technically most of the people in that room shouldn't be privy to restricted information until they've fully enrolled."

Ooooooooh. That was interesting. Ruby could feel the dam in the back of her head start to give a little.

"What _specifically_ do you think he was hinting at, though? Just, you know, in case...there were...multiple meanings..."

Weiss was giving her a _look_. Ruby tried to keep her face innocent.

"I'll tell you after initiation," Weiss said coolly.

"Weeeiiis..."

"I'm serious, Ruby. The information restrictions aren't a joke."

"But Weiss, c'mon. It's not like anyone would know."

Weiss covered her face with a hand, sighing.

"Ruby...even ignoring how incredibly naive that is in _general_ , it's quite likely that in this _specific_ instance professor Ozpin is literally watching us talk right now."

Ruby took a second to parse that.

"Er...what?"

"After you and Pyrrha fell into the forest, professor Ozpin was watching you on his tablet scroll to make sure you were alright. He held up the whole launch for it."

Ruby felt confused for a moment as she adjusted to the new information, followed by a wave of relief. Professor Ozpin had been watching, making sure she and Pyrrha had things under control. She didn't know his semblance, but if there had never been a casualty during initiation, it was entirely possible he'd had some way of intervening.

They were probably being watched right now. _Yang_ was probably being watched right now. She'd had a nagging worry in the back of her mind, ever since things had started going wrong this morning, that maybe professor Ozpin wasn't the sort of man she'd thought he was. If he was willing to throw children into mortal danger with barely a thought...but no, she hadn't been giving him enough credit.

Right on the heels of the relief came a wave of implications.

There was no way the forest was blanketed with enough cameras for one to be located right where she'd landed. That meant the cameras were in the sky. The tree cover wasn't very thick; they'd be able to see quite a bit.

Ruby knew Atlas had surveillance drones that could observe the ground from miles overhead. And classified tech was probably at least a decade ahead of what she'd read about.

The details didn't matter, though. Or, rather, they mattered immensely, but she could work with what she had.

There were probably multiple cameras in the sky. Professor Ozpin would want to watch many areas at once, and if the angle was too sharp the trees would block line of sight. Everyone Ozpin wanted to watch probably had a camera roughly overhead.

That meant _Yang_ probably had a camera roughly overhead.

Ruby's semblance tipped, finally, the world around her slowing almost to a standstill. She barely noticed the sensation as her thoughts continued to race.

These cameras were transmitting information to Ozpin somehow. Maybe they were using directional transmitters, but probably not. Her scroll was jammed everywhere she'd been in the forest, but they could easily be on a different frequency. If she could build a receiver, it probably wouldn't be _that_ hard to triangulate their locations from the signal strength. It might get tricky if there were several close together.

She had a bunch of wires for hooking Crescent Rose up to her scroll; those would work fine as an antenna.

She racked her brain for what little she remembered about antenna design. She vaguely recalled that long wire antennas were supposed to work kind of OK for a lot of frequencies, but she didn't have nearly enough material. If the cameras were transmitting over long distances, probably the frequency was pretty low. Maybe a loop antenna would be a good first effort? How in the world were you supposed to decide what shape to use without looking it up?

Ruby went to dig the wires out of her skirt, to see what she was working with, and her hand moved sloooowly through the thick air.

Oh. Right. Her semblance.

She looked down at her pocket, then over at Weiss, then at the river.

Then back at her pocket.

She couldn't _possibly_ be expected to stop thinking about this and go fishing. That just wasn't reasonable.

~o~O~o~O~o~

Ruby sat in the mouth of the cave they'd chosen, headphones on, coding. The sun had set almost two hours ago, and the glare of her scroll's screen left her night-blind, immersed in her own little world.

She'd been really into programming as a kid, but her semblance had nudged her into more physical forms of engineering. Every time she got too excited, the world around her would slow, including the interface on her scroll. It was impossible to get into a flow state when she had to stop typing for a few minutes at exactly the wrong times.

(She'd tried pushing before, and had even managed to make her scroll hiccup a few scrunched petals out of its audio jack on one occasion, but she'd never managed to speed up its computation even a tiny bit.)

Ruby was discovering that programming without a CCT signal was almost a different activity entirely. She knew how to read from an analog cable, same as if she was taking diagnostics. Fine. She hooked up a cable, wrapped it into a loop a half-dozen times, and started collecting data.

Now how in the hell did you go from that time series data to the amplitude of a particular frequency? Somebody knew, obviously. She even knew exactly how to phrase the question to search for it, but there was no way to find out. It felt like losing a sense she hadn't even realized she'd been relying on her whole life, or like a big chunk of her memory had simply vanished.

She had the source code for her scroll's CCT module, but it was totally inscrutable.

A hand entered her field of vision, _in front of her scroll_ , waving back and forth. She felt a flash of irritation, barely fighting it down.

"Ruby?" a voice asked. She almost couldn't hear it over her song.

With a sigh, she looked up from her scroll, reaching up to drop her headphones down around her neck.

Jaune was in front of her, rubbing the back of his neck.

"Hi," she said, voice a little curt.

"Hi," he said. "It's, um, getting late. We need to figure out what we're doing tonight."

"What do we need to figure out?"

"Watch rotation, mostly."

"I can take the first watch. I'm not tired yet."

Ruby turned back to her scroll.

"Ah..." Jaune said, before she was even able to find her place in the code again.

Ruby closed her eyes, inhaling deeply through her nostrils.

She wasn't irritated at Jaune, she reminded herself.

She couldn't focus on this conversation and keep the CCT module's code in her head at the same time. She could already feel it starting to slip.

"Give me five minutes." she said, putting her headphones back on. She opened up a new file and starting jotting down everything she'd already figured out before she lost it. It was annoying, but honestly it was good to do anyway.

"...OK."

Jaune stood around awkwardly for the first minute or two, then went back into the cave.

It took her a little more than five minutes. Finally, though, she finished, pausing her music and removing her headphones again.

She took a moment to herself, just to calm her mind. She closed her eyes, more gently this time, and listened to the world around her.

The forest rustled in the wind. The signal fire they'd built crackled, surprisingly loud even though it was more than twenty feet from the cave mouth. Her clothing scraped against the rock as she shifted.

No insects, oddly enough.

She heard something else, though, emanating from inside the cave, far past the first bend. Low voices, carried farther than they should have been by the cave's acoustic properties.

"She isn't _normal_ ," said a high-pitched voice, too distorted by the echoes to be recognizable. "She's either off in her own little world, totally oblivious to everything around her, or she's chattering like an overexcited child about the stupidest things. Tonight it's antenna design, for some reason! 'Weiss, do you know anything about antennas? Weiss, do Atlassian surveillance drones use directional transmitters? Weiss, what does the top of the CCT tower look like in Atlas?' We're deep in the wilderness, surrounded by Grimm, no idea where we're going, and she just _will not_ take any sort of hint that nobody else cares about whatever she's..."

A creeping dread began to work its way through Ruby's stomach as she listened. The sense of calm she'd been cultivating disappeared in a instant. She scooted a little further into the cave, trying to hear.

"There's no need to get upset," another voice came bubbling up out of the cave.

"I'm not _upset_ ," said the first voice. "But I _am_ trying to convey to you how unacceptable this state of affairs is. She dragged me around all day looking for Jaune, never even _asking_ what my priorities were, and now that we finally found you two, suddenly her sister is the most important thing in the world. And what do you know, now everyone's gathering firewood and camping in this godforsaken cave just on the off chance her sister happens by, and oh by the way, instead of joining us in here and planning what to do next, she's off on her own working on some cockamamie scheme with professor Ozpin's surveillance network. Or at least I assume it's a cockamamie scheme, she never actually explained what she's _doing_."

"I...well, I admit that we do seem to have somewhat lost sight of our actual goal."

"Have you tried talking about it with her?" a deeper voice broke in. That must be Jaune. "I thought it was really helpful when the three of us talked things out. I think she'd take it well."

A sound echoed up, maybe a sigh, but it was hard to tell.

"I know. I should do that. The perfect version of me probably already would have. But am I going to carefully negotiate what sort of conversation we're having ten times a day? I don't think she even notices there's a problem. It's like she doesn't realize other people are there half the time. And I'm worried about setting her off."

"Setting her off?"

"We had an...altercation, before we met up with you. She's on a short fuse. And like I said, she isn't _normal_. I watched her dig around in a Grimm's severed neck for half an hour, like a toddler digging in a sandbox."

"Wait, what?"

"It's-"

"Look," the deeper voice broke in. "I understand where you're coming from. But please, just _talk_ to her about it. I can be there too if you're worried about something. I'm pretty sure it will go well, though."

"You're pretty sure? You've known her for less than two days."

"I'm pretty sure," the deep voice said confidently. "I've only known her for two days, but I recognize a lot if things. My youngest sister is...well, Ruby reminds me a lot of her. She can be difficult at times, and you need a little bit of patience, but-"

Ruby stood up, suddenly, pushing her way out of the cave.

She emerged into the night, the fire flaring impossibly bright in her vision now that her eyes had adjusted to the dark of the cave.

She turned away from it, walking with quick steps down the path that wound up the mountain to their cave. Twenty feet from the entrance, the path had turned far enough that she felt alone, the fire well out of sight.

Her throat was tight.

She didn't want to feel like this.

She stared into the darkness, her eyes slowly adjusting. She could just make out the shapes of the trees, dark forms swaying in the wind. She caught a flash of glowing red from deeper in the forest, gone too quickly to really be sure it had been there at all. Grimm.

Her heart sped up at the thought.

Her mind went back to the ursa she'd killed with Weiss, to the peaceful satisfaction she'd felt as it died, the sense that something was right in the world. Everything had felt so natural, when she and Weiss had been fighting together. It was only afterward that things started to go wrong. She wanted that again.

She took another step down the path, but hesitated. A tiny voice in the back of her head urged her on, but another, louder voice told her she was being an idiot.

She hunted Grimm for a _reason_. To protect people, or to train so she could protect them in the future. If she went into that forest now, who would she be protecting? She wouldn't be here if someone needed her. She wouldn't be here if Yang arrived.

And what would happen after? When she returned exhausted, hours later, aura and ammo depleted, and had to explain why she'd run into the forest alone after dark? She could almost hear the distorted echo of Weiss' voice, adding it to the list of things that made her bizarre. Or worse, that made her _scary_.

Ruby dropped to a squat, clutching her head and squeezing her eyes shut. She couldn't go forward, she _couldn't_ , but she couldn't stand to go back, either, to face everyone-

She felt her fingers tense, nails working into her scalp. The sense of dread in her gut was worsening. Feelings roiled through her with no release, fear and hurt and shame and disappointment, swirling around with nowhere to go, bottled up by the overwhelming sense of being _trapped_ , unable to move in any direction, unable to fix things-

The wind picked up, suddenly, traveling through the trees of the Emerald Forest with a _whoosh_ and a rustle of disturbed branches. It died and then picked up again, stronger, the trees creaking under its force, and Ruby fell backward, grabbing onto the rocks.

Ruby looked up at the sky, some instinctual part of her mind searching for storm clouds, but seeing only the shattered moon in a sea of stars.

A second later, the wind picked up again, and the moon was gone. It took Ruby a second to realize that it had been _covered_ , obscured by a dark shape.

Her eyes stung, and she tried to blink away tears that weren't there.

A different pair of eyes opened far, far above her: two terrible red orbs, impossibly large and impossibly bright in the darkness. She stared into them, and they stared back, filling her vision and washing out everything around them.

Her eyes _burned_ now, whether from the light or something else she couldn't say, and her thoughts tripped over each other, a raw scream in the back of her mind tumbling together with an overwhelming fear and a surreal sense that she must be dreaming.

Something that large - how could it _exist_ , let alone _fly_ -

The creature above her pumped its wings one last time, the resulting gale almost pressing her to the ground, and then it dove, growing and growing in her vision until it was too large to comprehend, rushing toward her like a tidal wave.

~o~O~o~O~o~

 **Author's Notes:**

 *** Thanks to Appliciousness for beta.**

 *** The next update will be on Sunday.**


	9. 1․9 Depths

**Interlude: Pyrrha**

Pyrrha sat in the lotus position, eyes closed, doing her best to ignore both Weiss' griping and Jaune's attempts at calming the girl.

She'd realized part way through the discussion that it was making her unhappy, and had decided to meditate instead.

Her two companions didn't sound particularly happy, either. All of them were tired, and stressed. It would be best to sleep, and resume this conversation in the morning - or, better yet, never to resume it at all, with the way it frayed people's emotions.

Pyrrha wasn't sure how to tell them this in a way they would understand. She had come to realize that people outside Mistral looked at the world very differently.

Pyrrha noticed her mind was wandering, and brought it back to her breathing. She breathed in, slowly, feeling her chest expand until it pressed against her armor. She breathed out, just as slowly, feeling her whole body relax.

In, then out.

She felt her usual smile returning to her face.

Her semblance tickled slightly, and she turned her attention to it in an instant. There was a chunk of metal approaching her at high speed, just at the edge of her range.

It was approaching _too_ fast, her semblance complained. And the forces on it were strange. That wasn't how metal was supposed to behave.

She felt a sudden pressure, as her semblance fought with whatever was acting on the metal, asserting that no, it would prefer metal be subject to _ordinary_ physics, thank you very much, at least until _she_ decided otherwise. The pressure increased rapidly, then evaporated in an instant, her semblance overpowering what she now realized must be Ruby's time dilation.

Her semblance might be narrow, but within its sphere of influence, it was absolute.

As soon as Ruby was dumped into normal time, Pyrrha's semblance asserted itself, her senses slipping into every ounce of metal the young girl carried. Pyrrha could feel the girl's Scythe trailing behind her as she ran, the grommets on her corset being pushed in and out rapidly from heavy breathing-

Pyrrha jumped up, Milo already unfolding in her hand, and ran toward the bend in the cave that led to the entrance. "Something's wrong!" she shouted, voice reverberating off the walls.

Weiss and Jaune barely had time to look up, and then she was around the bend, still tracking them with her semblance as they processed what was happening and found their feet.

Around the corner, she could see Ruby barreling toward them, something like terror in her eyes.

There was a bone-jarring _SLAM_ , as though another mountain had toppled over onto theirs. The ground shook, and hairline fractures opened in the walls and ceiling of the cave with a series of sharp cracks.

Ruby was thrown off her feet. Pyrrha steadied herself with her semblance, pushing on her armor to keep her balance as the floor tried to throw her over. She leaped through the air toward Ruby, as much to hide the fact she wasn't standing normally as to cover the distance faster.

She landed just as the shaking subsided, reaching down and grabbing Ruby's arm. She pulled on her own bracer a little with her semblance, easily hauling the young girl to her feet.

Ruby looked shaken. Her eyes were wide, showing too much white.

Weiss finally arrived on a glyph, rapier in hand, and Jaune rounded the bend a second later, just as Ruby was starting to speak.

"We need to get into the caves," she said, breathless.

"Ruby, what's going on?" Pyrrha asked.

"Grimm. We need to get into the _caves_."

"We can't go into the caves," Weiss said. "That earthquake was massive. An aftershock might bring the whole mountain down on our heads."

"We'll have to fight through them," Pyrrha said, nodding.

"No!" Ruby practically screamed at them. "We need to-"

There was another impact - weaker, just enough to jostle the four of them - and then the mouth of the cave exploded inward.

~o~O~o~O~o~

Ruby kept her feet this time, spinning to look at the cave mouth. Dust and shards of rock washed over her, pinging off her aura, and she got her first good look at the ancient Nevermore.

Just its head dwarfed the Ursa she'd fought earlier. It could barely fit the front half of its beak through the entrance. Its eyes were far above the top of the cave, but the sickly red light from them streamed through the cracks of the shattered mountainside, bathing everything in an otherworldly crimson.

The beak was beautiful in a way that turned her stomach. Intricate lattices of bone wound down from the creature's mask to wrap it in hundreds of sharp blades, arranged almost artistically, eventually twining together into a single wickedly pointed beak.

The creature moved unnaturally, with sharp jerky movements too fast for its size, its beak carving effortless gashes in the rock. Neck muscles larger than Ruby strained, and the entrance to the cave cracked open like a clam, the beak forcing itself a good ten feet further in.

"Into the caves!" Jaune shouted, echoing her earlier words. "We can't fight that."

The creature opened its beak, inhaling, and Ruby felt herself drawn toward it, the air whipping at her cloak like a sail. She slammed Crescent Rose's blade into the ground, holding herself in place, and Pyrrha let go of her to grab Jaune before he tumbled into the creature's maw.

Then it was exhaling, the force far greater, and Ruby was pressed hard against Crescent Rose's shaft. A sound reverberated in the tunnels, sibilant at first, then droning, then _buzzing_.

That was odd, a small part of her mind noticed.

It almost sounded like...

Almost...

Ruby's mind slammed into a brick wall and broke into a million pieces. It was slow, too deep, and utterly _wrong_ , but...

The creature was speaking?

"Sssssuuuummmm..." it said.

The voice in the back of her head, which she vaguely realized had been screaming this entire time, redoubled its efforts. _It's wrong! It's_ _ **wrong**_ _! It mustn't_ _ **speak**_ _!_

"...eeeeerrrrr..."

Ruby bared her teeth. She could feel herself breathing too hard, chest heaving up and down.

"...eeeeennnnnndddddssss..."

"Ruby!" a voice yelled behind her. She barely heard it.

She knew she couldn't kill it, she _knew_ that. It was too big. But maybe that could be to her advantage? If she could cut her way inside it, maybe it couldn't reach her?

"...tttthhhheeeee..."

Her semblance was still down, but the abomination didn't seem like it could get deeper into the cave. She could wait.

"...fffffaaaaalllll..."

" _Ruby!_ " the voice practically screamed at her. She shook her head, ignoring it. She didn't have enough dust on her to hurt something this size. She'd have to carve it up by hand. She could strike at it with her semblance, then retreat into the caves, over and over and over, wear it down, over days or months or years.

"...bbbbbbbeeeeeeee..."

A hand grabbed her arm. She tried to pull free, not even looking back, but whoever had grabbed her was _strong_ , and then she was being yanked away from the Grimm, barely managing to hold on to Crescent Rose.

"...gggggiiiiinnnnssss..."

The voice hardly diminished in volume, even as she was dragged around the cave's bend at a dead run.

As soon as it was out of her sight, her head started to clear. She looked over to see Pyrrha, face expressionless, pulling her toward Jaune and Weiss. It felt more like her arm had been tied to a freight train than like she was being pulled; there was no give at all, no break in Pyrrha's stride.

The sounds behind them rose, to something between a moan and a shriek, and then the ground began to shake again.

Ruby started to run in earnest, until she was matching Pyrrha's pace. Weiss and Jaune joined them, Jaune pointing his scroll ahead of them to light the way as they plunged into the darkness.

"Weiss!" she said. "We need to get away from that thing. Use your glyphs."

"I can only take one," Weiss said.

Ruby's foot caught on the uneven cave floor, and she stumbled, Pyrrha hauling her back to her feet before she could hit the ground.

"Take Pyrrha," Ruby panted. "I can't use my semblance when she's nearby. When my semblance triggers, I'll take Jaune."

"No," Pyrrha said. "We should stick together."

"Not this again!" Weiss said.

The sound rose in pitch, and the shaking grew stronger.

Jaune was thrown to the ground, but Pyrrha grabbed him too, pulling both of them along without any apparent effort.

Far behind her, Ruby could hear the unmistakable sound of rock collapsing. There was no way that thing was big enough to topple a mountain, Ruby reassured herself. They just needed to get deeper.

"I think..." Pyrrha began.

"We're going to _die_ in a _cave-in_ while you think," Weiss said, voice rising to a screech. "Come with me or I'm going myself."

"Pyrrha," Jaune grunted between heavy breaths, "go with her."

Pyrrha hesitated one final time, then let go of their arms. A second later glyphs appeared under her and Weiss, catapulting both of them down the tunnel.

Ruby pushed forward, gritting her teeth. All she could do now was hope her semblance came up in time.

~o~O~o~O~o~

Jaune was _heavy_ , but that didn't pose much of a problem. Once Ruby got him in the air, gravity acted on him at its normal slow pace, and she could just push him down the tunnel like a balloon.

It probably hurt, as gentle as she tried to be, but he'd be fine, as long as his aura held up.

They finally caught up with Weiss and Pyrrha, who had stopped for them at a fork in the tunnel. The shaking was barely noticeable down here, and they could no longer hear the Nevermore's horrible voice.

Weiss was pacing in front of the fork, hands clasped behind her, caught mid-stride from the time dilation. The only light came from Pyrrha's scroll, and now Jaune's. Between the strange echoes and the long shadows, the entire scene had an eerie, ominous quality.

As soon as Ruby got close enough to Pyrrha to fall back into normal time, Weiss rounded on her.

"What _was_ that?" Weiss asked, striding right up to her. "What did you _do_?"

Ruby cringed back. She wasn't ready for this.

"Give her space," Jaune said.

"She overheard us," Pyrrha interjected, calmly.

The world seemed to pause for a moment.

"I have good senses," Pyrrha continued. "Ruby started to come down the tunnel while we were talking, paused, and left. The Nevermore attacked shortly after. She must have overheard us."

"And you didn't _mention_ this?" Weiss asked.

"I didn't think she was close enough to hear. Although maybe we should consider whether it was right to have such a conversation at all, if we were worried she would overhear it."

Everyone was looking at her. Ruby's stomach clenched, and she felt herself fold inward, shrinking.

What was she supposed to say to that? What was she supposed to _do_?

"Ruby..." Jaune said. She turned to look at him. His brow was wrinkled, eyebrows drawn together, somewhere between worried and guilty.

"Oh, she does _not_ get sympathy for this," Weiss said. "This is exactly what I was worried about! You say one wrong thing, one tiny wrong thing, and oh no, she's _upset_ , now a Nevermore the size of...of...so big I don't even _know how big it was_ , a Nevermore that big, shows up because this emotionally incontinent _child_ -"

"Weiss," Jaune said, a little forcefully. "You aren't helping."

Ruby stared down at her boots, holding her breath, barely moving. She didn't want to look at anyone.

"Oh, and of _course_ , I'm the bad guy again," Weiss said. "She collapses a mountain on top of us, but oh, Weiss was rude afterward, how could she. I'm sorry, Ruby, I can't believe I would do that to you. Let me try again: would you please, pretty please with sugar on top, if it isn't too much trouble, maybe possibly develop the basic emotional maturity to hear someone criticize you without endangering all of our lives?"

"Weiss," Jaune said again.

"All I'm asking is for-"

" _Weiss,_ " Jaune said, grabbing her shoulders. "You aren't helping. _Help._ "

Weiss was breathing hard through her nose, nostrils flared. For a second Ruby thought she was going to hit him. Instead, she got control of herself, clenching her eyes shut.

When she opened them, Weiss' face was blank, anger replaced with something cold. "I'm sorry," she said, voice stiff. "You're right. That wasn't helpful."

Jaune let go of her, and Weiss stepped back, pinching the bridge of her nose.

"This is the third time in two days I have severely underestimated the harm my words would cause. Putting aside for the moment the question of fault, or what _should_ happen, it's clear that what _needs_ to happen right now is that I need to exercise better control."

She looked around between the three of them, face blank. "In my estimation, this merits extreme measures. For the rest of initiation, I will refrain from making negative comments of any kind. Please hold me to this. I will be relying on the three of you to recognize and prevent bad decisions in the meantime."

Finally, she turned to Ruby. Ruby looked away, not wanting to make eye contact with that blank mask. "Ruby, after initiation, we will need to have a _long_ discussion, but this isn't the time or the place. Let's put it behind us for now and try to work together. I'm sorry for my part in putting all of us in danger."

Ruby nodded, still staring at her feet. "I'm sorry too," she said in a small voice.

Weiss's face softened at that, just a touch, and then she turned away, looking down the two passages in front of them.

She checked the cartridges on her rapier, frowning a little. "I've used a little more than half my air dust. We should try to preserve the rest for emergencies. I'll explore the left tunnel on foot. One of you can explore the right, we'll meet back here in an hour and decide which way to go. Is that acceptable?"

"Do you want someone to go with you?" Jaune asked.

"I'll be fine."

And with that, Weiss started walking down the lefthand tunnel, not looking back.

Jaune and Pyrrha exchanged some sort of look, and without a word Pyrrha headed down the righthand tunnel, Milo still unsheathed in her hand. She clapped Ruby on the shoulder as she walked by, making her flinch a little.

It took a surprisingly long time for their footsteps to fade, but eventually it was just her and Jaune, standing in silence.

"Huh," Jaune said. "I guess sound carries a long way down here."

Ruby covered her face with her hands, leaning back against the cave wall and sliding down to a sitting position. Something sharp was digging into her tailbone, but she couldn't really muster the energy to care.

She heard Jaune walk over, sitting down beside her. His leg bumped hers as he sat, but then he scooted over a bit, giving her room.

She scrunched her eyes, feeling her throat tighten. She wasn't going to let herself cry. If she did, that would be it, it would be over. Whatever respect she could one day salvage from this whole mess would be gone, and whenever Jaune thought of her, all he'd be able to think about was the little girl crying in the dark cave while other people looked for a way out.

"You look like you could use a hug," Jaune said.

It was just about the worst thing he could have said. If he'd gone off and gotten a PhD in psychology, done extensive interviews with everyone she'd ever known, and written his thesis on exactly the worst possible thing to say to her at this moment, that might well have been it.

Ruby scrunched her eyes tighter, pulling her knees up to her face to press against the back of her hands. She _wasn't_ going to cry. She could manage that, at least.

"...no thanks." she whispered, once she trusted her voice. Jaune didn't respond.

They sat like that for a while. Jaune switched off the flashlight from his scroll at one point, the world darkening behind the wall of her hands.

"I never said thank you," he said, out of nowhere.

Ruby's mind stumbled on that for a second. "Thank you" for what?

"For trying to save me this morning," he clarified, as if reading her mind. "Weiss told me what happened at the cliffs. She told me what happened afterward, too. Tracking me down all day to make sure I was alright."

There was another period of silence, like he was waiting for her to speak.

"'Thank you' doesn't really cover it. I'd be dead right now if you and Pyrrha hadn't come after me. We just met, practically, and you've already saved my life."

"Pyrrha saved your life," Ruby said quietly.

"She told me afterward that most of the Grimm stayed behind when she ran. I'm guessing that was you?"

After a moment, Ruby nodded into her knees, before realizing he probably couldn't see. "Yeah," she said, still quiet.

"So you can see why I'm feeling like a real grade-A jerk right now. You save my life, I don't even say _thanks_ , and now..."

Jaune trailed off.

"I'm fine," Ruby said in a tight voice, wishing she sounded any other way. "Really."

"Oh, of course _you're_ fine," Jaune said. "You're going to sit there quietly until Weiss and Pyrrha come back, then tell us you came up with some plan to get out of here, find your sister, swing by the temple on the way to collect those pesky relics, and maybe get bumped ahead another year or two just for kicks.

"But _I'm_ sitting here feeling like a jerk. Maybe you could throw me a bone or something?"

It wasn't a particularly good joke, but the stress of the situation made it work somehow. Ruby hiccuped out a small laugh.

"There we go. That makes me feel a _little_ better."

Another laugh forced its way out, more forceful this time. Ruby clamped down on it, worried it might turn into something else.

She looked up from her hands, finally, over to where Jaune was. Her eyes were maybe a _little_ damp, but she definitely wasn't crying.

Instead of Jaune, all she saw was blackness. Oh right. It was dark.

She fumbled for her scroll and flicked on the flashlight, wincing a little from the sudden brightness. Jaune was sitting barely a foot away, staring at her. He squinted in the light, looking a little bewildered.

Once Jaune realized she was looking at him, he contorted his face into the worst imitation of a pout she'd ever seen, leaning back against the wall and crossing his arms.

She couldn't help but smile, just a little bit. She punched him lightly in the arm.

"Ow," he said, rubbing the spot with an offended look.

"Come on," she said. "You look ridiculous."

Jaune gave up on the act, smiling back at her, looking surprisingly relaxed for the situation.

"Well," he said, "if we're being serious..."

The smile fell off Ruby's face, and she turned back to her knees, hugging them close. She didn't cover her face again, though, and the tears didn't feel like they were just about to break through any more.

"I was thinking," he said. "When we were figuring out where to look for the temple, you insisted we list out everything we knew, just the facts, not trying to analyze them right away. It reminded me a lot of what Weiss did, by the river, when she was trying to fix the...what did she call it, the group social dynamic? She just said exactly what happened, from her perspective, and how it made her feel. No analysis, no judgement. I thought it worked really well."

Ruby pulled her knees a little tighter as she thought about Weiss.

"You two have a lot in common, actually," Jaune continued. "You come from very different places, but there's a lot of shared ground."

"And I was just thinking, you know, if it worked _twice_..."

Ruby sighed.

"I mean," Jaune said, "if you don't want to talk about it, that's totally fine. But if you _do_ want to talk about it, I want to listen. Plus, you know, we have nothing to do for the next half hour."

There was another break in the conversation. Ruby fiddled with her scroll, watching the light play over the cave wall, casting long shadows when she aimed it down the tunnel behind them.

"I don't even know," Ruby said quietly.

"You don't even know?"

"I just, um. It's hard to sort everything out. There are so many things that are wrong, and they all sort of run together and muddle."

"Hm. Well, what's the first thing that's wrong?"

"The first?"

"Sure. What was the first thing that went wrong."

Ruby's face darkened a little.

"Yang. We're never going to meet up with her now. Worse, she's out there with that _thing_. If she saw the fire and headed toward it, or if she was just heading to the temple on her own..."

Jaune nodded, not saying anything.

"And then Weiss," Ruby said. "She thinks I'm some kind of freak, and that I'm being rude or domineering or something. I don't...it's just so frustrating. What did I even do wrong? Why didn't she just tell me what she wanted me to do? I'd just do it! I always just do it."

"Figuring out what people want can be hard," Jaune said.

"I'm sure it's a _huge_ problem for you," Ruby said, with more than a little bitterness in her voice.

Jaune didn't respond. After a second, Ruby kept talking.

"And Pyrrha. She's too nice to say anything, but she thinks I'm, I don't even know, selfishly pursuing my own goals or something. Which maybe I am. But it's my _sister_. I can't just not look for her."

"I don't think anyone with a sibling can blame you for that," Jaune said. "I think I told you I have seven sisters? If one of them were in those woods, I wouldn't let anything stop me from finding her."

Ruby's stomach tightened, the off-hand comment reminding her of what Jaune had said at the end of the conversation. _My youngest sister is...well, Ruby reminds me a lot of her. She can be difficult at times, and you need a little bit of patience, but-_

"Ah," Jaune said after a pause. "I guess I'm next, after Weiss and Pyrrha?"

"You think I'm difficult," Ruby said, the words spilling out. "You need to be patient with me. Even right now. I _hate_ it. I'm not a child. I can take care of myself, I don't need someone to sit around and pat me on the head and comfort me when something bad happens, while everyone else-"

Ruby was interrupted by Jaune laughing, a deep belly laugh erupting out of nowhere and echoing through the cave.

She looked up, too shocked to be offended. He was bent over, his chest heaving as he tried to get himself under control.

"Sorry," he said, gasping for air. "Sorry. I don't - wow. I guess it's really true, nobody ever sees us the way we see ourselves."

"What do you mean?" she asked, not sure if he was laughing at her, or, or at _what_.

Jaune straightened up, taking a second to get the smile off his face. He looked her in the eyes, and Ruby fidgeted a bit, resisting the urge to look away. "Ruby," he said, "the fact that you even _worry_ about that-"

He broke off, gathering his thoughts.

"Ruby, do you have any idea what it's like talking to you? I can barely keep up with you to begin with, and then your semblance goes off, and you have all these thoughts to catch me up on, then just as I'm starting to get my feet, _bam_ it goes off again.

"I haven't seen you fight yet, but you're apparently intense enough it _scared_ Weiss, and you're confident enough you were out hunting in this forest alone before we'd even been given sleeping bags.

"And that's not even getting into the details of your semblance. I don't know exactly how long it lasts, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that you've spent more years hunting than the rest of us combined, if you count the time dilation.

"But anyway, where I'm going with this is that when I look at you, I don't see a _child_. I see this crazy prodigy with a tricked-out combat scythe, and I think, 'man, I hope she's around in case something happens.'"

Ruby looked away, and she could feel her cheeks heating up. Her hands found the hem of her skirt and started to fiddle with it.

There were too many things she wanted to say, so she said none of them.

"I don't want Weiss to be scared of me," she said instead.

"She'll come around."

 _How do you know?_ she could ask. _You've known her for less than two days._ Jaune would probably laugh.

But she had one more thing she wanted to get off her chest.

"The Grimm..." she said.

"Don't even mention that one," Jaune said. "That wasn't your fault. The way you felt wasn't your fault, and even if it was, something that size being nearby _certainly_ wasn't your fault. It's not like your feelings summoned a nevermore older than Vale into existence."

Ruby felt the creeping dread in her stomach again. He wasn't mentioning the worst part.

You couldn't run from the Grimm. You could avoid them, or they could avoid you, but once they'd decided to kill you, they never gave up.

She wasn't sure about the others, but she at least would see the creature again. It might search for her at Beacon tomorrow. It might ambush her in the forest next month. If it was truly ancient, it might bide its time longer, for years or decades. But eventually it would come for her.

It said a lot about how bad the situation was, that an ancient nevermore coming to kill her one day wasn't even her largest concern.

"It's not even that," Ruby said. "It's..."

She didn't want to refer to the creature as speaking. That was one of her rules. Don't humanize them. You didn't kill Grimm, you destroyed them, ended them, hacked them to pieces.

By definition, Grimm didn't speak.

"It's the words it made," she said.

Jaune nodded. "Summer ends, the fall begins."

Ruby shuddered.

"It _is_ the end of summer," Jaune mused. "And Fall is next. Although I don't know why a Grimm would care much about the time of year."

"Don't joke," Ruby said.

Jaune looked over at her face. "Sorry."

"It's OK. But I think this whole thing _was_ my fault, actually. I think it wanted me to hear that."

"You specifically?"

Ruby nodded. "I don't really like to talk about this, so don't repeat it to anyone, but, um, my mother died when I was young. She was a huntress, and, well, you know. Her name was Summer."

"...oh." Jaune said. "That's..."

"I hope I'm wrong," Ruby said.

"I do too. Because if you aren't, that's...oh, wow..."

Ruby knew what he meant. There were so many implications it was impossible to process them all. She'd have to ask one of her professors, or maybe the headmaster.

She was starting to feel a little more like herself.

Even putting aise the nevermore, things still weren't great. Weiss would be back soon, and she'd have to _deal_ with that.

They were also trapped underground, she reminded herself. Oh, and they still needed to actually pass initiation.

Things weren't great, but they felt manageable.

She took a deep breath, lifting her arms over her head and stretching.

She looked over at Jaune, who raised his eyebrows, and a thought came into her head.

Oh, what the hell. Things couldn't exactly get _more_ awkward.

"Um...Jaune?" she asked. Fortunately, she was already blushing from earlier. "Is that hug still on the table?"

~o~O~o~O~o~

After getting a hug, Ruby didn't really want to let go. It took a little bit of doing, but they found a comfortable position where she didn't have to. Jaune was leaned up against the cave wall, while Ruby snuggled her head into the soft section of hoodie under his breast plate.

It was nice to get a long hug. Yang always hugged too tight, and never for all that long.

Ruby frowned, thinking about her sister.

"Jaune?" she asked.

"Yeah?"

"What's your sister like?"

"Which one?"

"The one I remind you of."

Jaune laughed. "Don't think about it too much, Ruby. You remind me of her, but you're different in a lot of ways, too."

"But what's she _like_?"

"Hm. Well, she really likes hugs, for one thing."

Ruby craned her head up to look at Jaune, arching an eyebrow.

"I'm not kidding," he said. "I was the only one younger than her, so I got the brunt of it. She'd just walk up and hug me sometimes, with no warning."

"Wait. She's older than you?"

"Yeah. All my sisters are older than me, but she's the youngest. We're a little over a year apart, so we were pretty close growing up."

Ruby turned her face back into Jaune's stomach. Right, he'd mentioned yesterday that he was the youngest.

Jaune thought she was like his _older_ sister?

"Tell me more," Ruby said.

"Hm. Let's see. She could be very particular about the strangest things. In the winter, she used to open the window so she could sleep with like ten blankets. Nobody could get her to stop, and it drove my dad nuts.

"Apparently the insulation wasn't as good on the internal walls, so it was making the whole house colder. He eventually just gave up and redid the walls on her room to be like the outer ones. She had to sleep on the couch for a week while he did the renovations."

Ruby giggled. "Redid the walls?"

"Oh, yeah. My dad built the whole house himself. He was a hunter, but he was only gone about half the time, and he liked to keep busy. It was the frontier, so we didn't have much, but there was plenty of land and wood. After a decade or two it was less of a house and more of a sprawling mess, but we all had our own rooms, and it was a lot of fun to run around in as a kid."

"Mm. My dad's a hunter, too, but he mostly does boring dad stuff with his free time."

"That sounds about right. It was just the three of you, I guess?"

Ruby tightened her grip a little.

"Yeah," she said. "My uncle Qrow came by sometimes to help out, but he was pretty busy. Sometimes they'd both be gone, and it was just me and Yang."

There was a bit of a pause, both of them thinking their own thoughts.

"Oh!" Jaune said. "I forgot the big one. She loves cooking."

"Cooking?"

"Yeah. It was the darndest thing. My dad used to do all the cooking - which meant a lot of leftovers, incidentally - and she loved to just sit on the counter and watch him do it, before she could even talk. My mom figured out that she could get her to be quiet by handing her a scroll with a cooking show on it, and after that there was no turning back.

"It was kind of a problem for a while, actually. She started trying to help in the kitchen when she was, I dunno, six or something? But my dad would always shoo her away. He didn't mean any harm by it, he was just like that. One day she woke up early and tried to make breakfast for everyone, but she burned herself real bad on the pan, and mom freaked out.

"It all got sorted out though. My mom told dad he had to let her help, and he did. By the time she was ten she was cooking alone when he was gone, and by twelve he was mostly helping. It was amazing, she was this tiny little kid - she had to stand on a stepstool to use the stove safely - but she would make all these incredible things. On the weekends she'd spend all day on it. You'd go down in the morning, and something would already be marinating.

"It was fun to watch her grow up into it, too. She went through a period where it was almost like it didn't matter whether anyone liked her food. She'd cook up this elaborate meal, take a bunch of pictures of it, and then serve it to us almost as an afterthought. Then a year later, it totally flipped. Every night she'd go around the table and make everyone say how much they liked every dish, and she'd write it all down. She has a stack of notebooks in one corner of her room, won't let anyone else touch 'em."

Wow. That hit a little close to home.

"Anyway, she was very particular about everything. Things had to be exactly where she wanted them in the cupboards. Dinner was at 8:30 sharp, every night. She only trusted my dad and my oldest sister to set the table, not even my mom. It was kind of strange, but I think it was really good for her.

"It was a little ironic, actually, because she always _hated_ family dinner as a kid. You had to drag her to the table, and she'd just sit there fidgeting the whole time. But as soon as she was the one putting it on, she was having a ball. She'd be popping in and out of the kitchen, asking people if they needed anything, laughing..."

Jaune trailed off.

Ruby thought about prodding him again, but maybe she was being nosy? Or maybe she was supposed to reciprocate and share a memory of her own?

Oh, wait. She could hear footsteps echoing up from one of the forks in the path. She hadn't been able to hear over Jaune's voice, but apparently he'd noticed.

Had it really been that long already?

Jaune shifted under her, like he was considering standing, but before she could parse that and release her grip, Weiss's head popped into view.

Ruby realized, suddenly, what the situation looked like. She let go of Jaune instantly, standing up and brushing nonexistent dust off of her skirt.

Weiss stopped, an unreadable look on her face. "You _cannot_ be serious," she said, her voice sounding oddly strained. "In what _bizarre_ universe-"

Weiss bit off the rest of her sentence, pinching the bridge of her nose and closing her eyes.

She opened them again a moment later, and when she spoke her tone was more normal. "I've finished exploring the passage," she said. "It descends for about a mile, where it intersects a dense network of ppcaves. I found nothing else of interest."

Nobody said anything for a bit.

"Good...good work," Jaune finally managed, sounding a little flustered.

Ruby dropped her head to her hands, groaning.

~o~O~o~O~o~

 **Author's Notes:**

 *** Thanks to Appliciousness for beta.**

 *** The next update will be on Sunday.**


	10. 1․10 Contact

"It wasn't what it looked like," Ruby said, probably for the twentieth time. Jaune coughed into his hand.

"Great," Weiss said, voice flat. "Glad to hear it."

"I'm serious. It was just a hug. I was experiencing emotional distress, and Jaune offered me a hug. That's it. If it was anything else, we would have been _way_ more worried about you coming back, so we would have noticed you coming and you wouldn't have caught us."

"I believe you."

"Weiiiisss..."

Jaune cleared his throat, loudly. "I think I hear Pyrrha," he said.

Ruby listened more closely. Sure enough, there were footsteps coming from the other passageway.

She looked at Weiss, who raised her eyebrows. Ruby had no idea what that meant.

Shortly after, Pyrrha's head popped into view as well. She smiled happily and waved at them.

"Did you find anything?" Jaune called out as she approached.

"Not much, I'm afraid. It just keeps going."

Jaune sighed. "Well," he said, looking between the three girls. "Which route seems best?"

~o~O~o~O~o~

In the end they decided on Weiss' route. They traveled together down to the cave network, then split up to explore it, each of them using their weapon to carve markers into the cave walls as they went.

Ruby picked her way gingerly down the path she'd chosen, her scroll's flashlight aimed in front of her. It was a little creepy down here, now that she was alone. The harsh white light of her scroll's LEDs cast strange shadows over the uneven terrain, tricking her eye into seeing movement where there was none. It was utterly silent, except for the echoes of her own footsteps, and she found it all too easy to slip into her thoughts.

Things were actually pretty OK. Sure, they were trapped down here, but they had days to find their way out. Maybe more. Aura tended to interact sort of oddly with things like dehydration. And if professor Ozpin had been watching them like Weiss said, surely he'd mount a rescue operation at some point.

Ruby yawned. She angled her scroll down and checked the screen: 2AM. She could tell she was tired, in some abstract sense, but she probably couldn't sleep if she tried. Her brain kept running and running, chewing everything over.

Things were actually pretty OK, but she had an underlined bullet point in her notes saying not to get complacent.

Wandering around randomly was all well and good, but could they do better?

Sound echoed in here. Maybe there was some way to map the caves acoustically? It sounded vaguely plausible, but even if the idea worked, she still didn't have a CCT signal. Her earlier troubles trying to triangulate a particular frequency had given her an appreciation for how much harder that made everything.

Maybe there was something they could look at in the way the caves were formed. These were limestone caves, right? That meant they'd been slowly dissolved out of the rock by rainwater. They didn't form _randomly_ , there might be some sort of pattern, some way of identifying which way would lead up.

Her scroll had a compass. They could at least try not to head too far into the middle of the mountain.

Hm. Actually, looking at the problem from another angle...

The sound of a gunshot echoed through the caves, shockingly loud. Ruby jumped, hand reaching for Crescent Rose, before she remembered that they'd agreed on a signal.

After a moment, there was a second shot, then a third. That meant they'd _found_ something. Ruby took off toward the noise.

~o~O~o~O~o~

"I found something," Pyrrha said.

Ruby looked around. It seemed like a normal section of cave to her. She made eye contact with Jaune, who shrugged, and with Weiss, who raised her eyebrows. Ruby _still_ didn't know what that meant.

"Er..." she said. "Where is it?"

"Below us," Pyrrha said, tapping her foot on the ground. Ruby aimed her scroll's flashlight at her feet. Sure looked like rock, alright. She tried tapping her own foot on it. Sure _felt_ like rock, too.

"Um," Ruby said. "I don't see anything."

"There's something there, maybe twenty feet down."

"How do you know?"

Pyrrha smiled, clasping her hands in front of her. She looked a little nervous. "Just a feeling," she said, voice chipper.

Ruby glanced around. Jaune looked as confused as she felt. Weiss just rolled her eyes, making a zipping motion across her lips.

"How strong is this feeling?" Ruby asked. "On a scale of one to ten?"

"Ten. There's definitely something down there."

Ruby shrugged. It Pyrrha Nikos said she had a feeling, Ruby was prepared to believe her. "Alright then," she said, "I guess we have to excavate."

"How long is it going to take to dig through twenty feet of rock?" Jaune asked.

"We have burn dust to spare," Weiss said. "We should blast it."

Ruby turned to look at her, horrified. "Won't that bring the cave down on our heads?"

Weiss sniffed. "Of course not. We should stand well back, for safety, but most of the dust mines in Atlas are still excavated explosively. It's cheap and effective."

"Wait wait wait. Wouldn't the dust, you know, combust? Before you could mine it?"

"Unrefined dust is much less reactive. But, yes, the last few feet to the vein are usually dug by hand."

Weiss took her rapier out and bent down, scraping the tip over the cave floor.

"It's limestone," Ruby said.

Weiss nodded. "I don't suppose that scythe of yours happens to have a drill on it, too?" she asked.

Ruby shook her head. This always seemed to happen. As soon as she thought up a new feature for Crescent rose, suddenly she needed it all the time, like when you learn a new word and then hear it everywhere for a few days.

"No!" Ruby said. "But I was just thinking earlier today that it needed one! It would be useful for all sorts of things, like drilling through Grimm masks, but it's kind of hard to make a mechashift drill because-"

"Right." Weiss said, turning away from her. "It might take a while to scrape out a hole for the burn dust, then."

"I can take care of it," Pyrrha said, reaching back and removing Milo from her back. "Where do you want the hole?" she asked, extending her weapon to a spear.

Weiss looked at her, raising an eyebrow, but didn't say anything. "We might want more than one," she said. "But let's do a test run first. Can you put one directly over...whatever it is, and as deep as possible?"

Pyrrha nodded. She grasped Milo's shaft with both hands, lifting him high, and then plunged the spearhead straight down toward her feet.

Pyrrha's spear sank smoothly into the rock, making a strange grinding noise, but barely even _slowing_ as it pierced multiple feet into the cave floor, two hairline cracks extending outward from the impact point.

Ruby's mouth fell open. That shouldn't be possible. Pyrrha shouldn't have enough leverage, for one thing. Even if she could produce a strike strong enough to pierce through hard rock like that, it should have lifted her off her feet, at the very least. And the way the spear hadn't even slowed...

 _Semblances aren't fair_ , Ruby reminded herself. Pyrrha's somehow granted her physics-defying feats of strength, incredible luck, unspecified super-senses, the ability to interfere with Ruby's semblance, and who knows what else-those were just the feats Ruby had seen _today_.

Weiss coughed into her hand. "Right," she said. She unsheathed her rapier, popping out the dust cylinder and frowning at it. "How much burn dust do we have?" she asked.

"I'm low on shells," Pyrrha said, easily pulling Milo from the ground and sheathing it behind her. "I'd prefer not to run out entirely."

Ruby tallied up her own resources in her head. She had a dozen explosive rounds left, the two _big_ explosive rounds in the special belt around her waist, a little over a hundred regular rounds packed into her skirt pockets that she could salvage the propellant from...

"A little under half a kilogram," Ruby said. "More like two hundred grams if we don't want to sit here disassembling rounds all day."

Weiss nodded. "That should be plenty," she said, stooping down to the hole. She popped the transparent container of burn dust out of her cylinder, carefully pouring a very small amount down into the opening Pyrrha had made.

"We need to plug the top," Weiss said, "or most of the burn dust will just be blown out before it activates. We'll need a fuse, too, just in case I'm wrong about this bringing the cave down."

Ruby thought back to their fight with the ursa, when Weiss had frozen most of the Grimm's head, leaving just the back of the neck exposed.

"Can't you just make a cap with earth dust?" she asked.

Weiss tapped her chin. "I could try," she said, "but I won't have the same sort of control I have with ice. I might accidentally detonate the charge early if I let the activated earth dust touch the burn."

Huh. Fascinating. Ruby filed that little tidbit away for later.

"Maybe that's a good thing?" Ruby asked. "If the cap forms fast, then triggers the burn dust, we wouldn't need to make a fuse. How far away do you think you could be and still hit the top of the hole?"

Weiss grimaced. "It's a little unorthodox."

"Yeah, well, you just _eyeballed_ the amount of burn dust in the charge, and we're setting it off inside a _spear-hole_. I don't think we're going to be passing any inspections either way."

Weiss cracked a smile at that, and Ruby had to stop herself from squealing. She'd made Weiss _smile_. It had only taken, what, eighteen hours?

"Fair point," Weiss said, looking around. "And I suppose it doesn't matter if I need multiple attempts. Let's try from the tunnel mouth over there."

~o~O~o~O~o~

 **BOOM**

Ruby's fingers were in her ears, and the explosion was _still_ loud. She waited for the reverberating echoes to die away before taking them out and walking over to help with the new pile of shattered rubble.

Excavation, as it turned out, was rather boring. There were a few minutes of anticipation, a few seconds of excitement, and then it was time to haul rocks again for a while.

They'd dug deeply enough that Pyrrha was the only one strong enough to throw the larger chunks of rock out of the bottom of the pit without tiring quickly. Jaune joined her in the bottom, throwing the smaller rocks up, while Weiss and Ruby dragged the debris away from the lip to make room for more.

It was slow, boring work, and it didn't help that it was pushing 4AM at this point. Weiss kept chewing on her lip, looking annoyed, and even Jaune and Pyrrha were working in sluggish silence.

Ruby let out a huge yawn, stretching her arms wide over her head, and Weiss shot her an irritated look. Ruby quickly put her arms down and grabbed another rock.

"I think we've found what we're looking for," Pyrrha called from the bottom of the pit.

Ruby's exhaustion evaporated in an instant. She darted over to the edge, looking down, but all she could see was Jaune and Pyrrha standing on a pile of rubble, barely illuminated by the scroll Pyrrha had tucked into her circlet to light their work.

Pyrrha glanced up at her. "Let me get a few more of these big ones out of the way first," she said.

Ruby suppressed a small whine. She wanted to _see_.

Pyrrha bent down and grabbed a particularly large chunk of rock, lifting it easily. She seemed to be letting the weight rest on her bracers. That made sense; sharp-edged rocks probably hurt, even if her aura would protect her skin.

Pyrrha heaved the rock up and over the side, making sure to aim it away from Ruby. Ruby waited impatiently, not bothering to clear the rubble now that they were almost done.

As more and more material was moved out of the way, Ruby thought she saw something on the ground glint as Pyrrha's scroll swept over it. Maybe they'd struck an ore vein? That would certainly be interesting, but after all this effort...

Finally, Pyrrha waved them down. Ruby jumped over the edge, skidding down the sharp slope to the bottom as fast as she could. Weiss alighted beside her a second later, landing elegantly on a black glyph, but Ruby barely even noticed.

She was staring, dumbstruck, at the ground. There was too much powdered rock to see clearly, but it _almost_ looked like...

"Close your mouths and cover your faces," Weiss said, aiming her rapier at the ground. Everyone did so, and a moment later there was a tremendous blast of air from the tip of Weiss' weapon, almost enough to knock Ruby onto her back. The blast threw the powdered rock into the air and out of the pit, scouring the floor clean.

Ruby moved her arm from in front of her face, looking again. It was just like she'd thought.

The bottom of the pit was _metal_. Not a vein of ore, but a continuous plane, clearly made by humans. It was dented down a little from the last blast, which meant there was probably _air_ underneath it.

The civilization whose remains they'd discovered couldn't have made this. They'd been living in caves for god's sake. Working enough metal for a plowhead was probably the pinnacle of technological achievement for them.

What the hell had they found?

"It's already weakened from the blast," Pyrrha said. "Should we punch through?"

Ruby looked around. Weiss was staring down, frowning intensely, and didn't meet her eyes. Jaune made eye contact and shrugged, his face resigned.

"I mean, what else are we going to do?" he asked.

Pyrrha waited another few seconds for objections, then lifted a leg, her golden metal greaves flashing for a moment in the light. She brought her foot down, hard, and the metal under them resonated like a muffled gong, the indentation deepening. She kicked it twice, then three times, and on the fourth the metal split beneath her.

Pyrrha didn't even lose her balance as her boot plunged through into the area below. There was a small puff of air - there must have been a small pressure differential - but other than that, nothing happened.

A little more work, and they'd opened up a hole. Ruby aimed her scroll's flashlight through, but all she saw was more metal. It looked like they'd found a long squareish tube, maybe ten feet across and ten feet high.

There were a few seconds of silence, until Weiss coughed pointedly. "Well," she said, "who's first?"

~o~O~o~O~o~

Ruby dropped through the hole, landing softly on her feet. She kicked up a puff of dust as she landed. Nobody had been here in a very, very long time.

She kept Crescent Rose collapsed on her back, but her hand lingered near him, more out of nervousness than actual need.

She aimed her scroll's flashlight around, trying to get a sense of her surroundings. She was in what looked like a long hallway. Now that she was down here, she could see that the sides were lined with empty rectangular holes.

She walked over to take a look at one. It looked like the sort of door frame you'd see on an Atlassian battleship. There was a rectangular hole in the wall to the left of the door frame, where an access panel might have once sat. The door frame itself had a thin slot where a door could slide in or out, but no door.

She peered through the doorway, but all she saw was an empty room with bare metal walls. No, wait, there were small slitted holes just inside the door. Air vents, probably.

"Ruby?" a voice called down from above her. "Is it safe to come down?"

"I think so!" she called back.

There was some shuffling up above as whoever was next prepared to make their descent.

Strong suspicion was slowly turning to certainty in her mind. This level of technology, built this long ago...

She was standing in a precursor installation.

A thrill ran up her spine, a spark of excitement and awe mixing into her stress, not _quite_ enough to tip her semblance, but she could feel it on the edge.

She stuck her flashlight into the hole where the access panel had been. The wall was hollow, and the inside was a scraped-up wreck. Someone had probably wanted to harvest the copper in the wires. If the precursors even _used_ copper wire...

Jaune dropped from the ceiling behind her, slipping a bit on the dust to land on his butt. She walked over, still distracted, and offered him a hand.

"Jaune," she said, not even bothering to look as she pulled him up, her eyes instead darting around to drink in every detail they could. "We need to explore this entire place _immediately_."

~o~O~o~O~o~

Thirty minutes later, Ruby was beginning to understand exactly how big the "entire place" was. They'd walked and walked, and seen nothing but bare metal hallways and empty rooms.

Pyrrha yawned, covering her mouth with her hand. Ruby tried to ignore it, but Jaune yawned right after, and his was much louder. Ruby felt her own yawn building up, and then she couldn't help it. Her jaw stretched itself wide, and when she tried to suppress the noise, it instead came out as a sort of whine.

"Will you three-" Weiss started. As soon as her mouth was open, a yawn slipped out of her mouth, too, interrupting her sentence.

Ruby snickered, and Weiss turned to glare at her.

"Maybe we should rest for the night." Jaune said, before that could develop any further.

"I think that's-" Weiss started, before stopping herself. "I don't know if that's a good idea or a bad idea," she continued in a neutral voice, "but an important piece of data you might be missing is that the air down here will grow stale very quickly. Natural caves have small openings and cracks that let air move around. Deep mines are different; you need to artificially circulate the air to keep it fresh."

"The rooms have vents," Ruby added, "but without any power..."

Weiss nodded. "This is a large space, so we should be fine if we keep moving, but we should think carefully before spending too long in one spot."

"What about a nap?" Jaune asked, reaching over his head to stretch. "I'm about to fall asleep on my feet here."

"A short power nap might be useful," Weiss said blandly.

They reached a T junction, and Jaune plopped down to the ground immediately, lying back with his hands under his head. "Great," he said. "Ooh, this dust is surprisingly soft."

Weiss rolled her eyes.

"I'm not tired," Ruby said, fighting back another yawn. It was a _little_ bit of a lie, but there was no way she was going to take a nap right now. She was way too stimulated. Her semblance had been on the edge of tipping over ever since she'd figured out where she was.

"I'm not particularly tired either," said Weiss.

"Well," Pyrrha said hesitantly, "If we're taking a break anyway..."

"Go ahead and nap," Weiss said. "I'll keep watch."

"I'll go scout ahead a bit," Ruby said. "See what's down one end of this fork."

She took off her cloak and balled it up, handing it to Pyrrha. "Here! It's a pillow."

"Thank you!" Pyrrha replied, smiling. "Don't go too far."

"I'll be back in twenty minutes," Ruby promised.

~o~O~o~O~o~

Ruby was just getting ready to head back when she spotted something anomalous. She'd come to what seemed like a major intersection, six different hallways all meeting in a single circular room.

She'd come down one of them. Four others looked like every hallway she'd seen up to now. But the _sixth_...

The dust was uneven. There were no footprints or anything. It still lay in smooth piles. But there was a wavy unevenness to it, as though it had been disturbed a long time ago, and new layers had settled into rolling hills over the disturbances.

Ruby considered going back to get the others, but her sense of curiosity was _burning_ , and whatever had upset the dust in that hall clearly hadn't been back in years.

Her conscious brain knew she was safe, but she still felt a shiver go down her spine as she began to pick her way carefully down the hall. She checked every room as she went, her scroll's flashlight showing nothing but an endless succession of empty gray rooms.

It was a little spooky how empty this place was. It made sense that it had been looted down to its hull - precursor technology was leagues ahead of what people could build _today_ , let alone centuries ago when this place had first been found. Hell, it had probably plundered multiple times over the centuries. But the empty, featureless corridors stretching away into darkness still made her uncomfortable.

And then, suddenly, the light of her scroll flashed across a splotch of color. Ruby froze.

One of the rooms was _furnished_. Not well, but it wasn't empty.

The back of the room was torn open, a wide gash opening onto what looked like a natural cave. If Weiss was right about how airflow worked underground, it might be livable.

There were layers and layers of dusty cloth covering almost a quarter of the room near the gash. It took Ruby a second to realize it was probably a bed.

On the far wall, there was what looked like an improvised desk. A wooden pallet sat on top of two oddly-shaped rocks that just happened to be the same height. Next to the desk were crates, and next to those what looked like an industrial steel drum.

Ruby entered the room slowly, a strange feeling of unease dogging the edges of her mind. She walked over and checked the drum. Empty.

The crates were about half-full, but too covered in dust to see what was inside. She reached her hand in hesitantly, as if afraid it would bite her, and wiped some of the dust away.

Army rations from the great war, stacked high. There had probably been water in the drum, gathered from somewhere and long-since evaporated.

It must have been decades ago, but someone had been _living_ here.

Ruby swept her scroll's flashlight over the desk, and from up close, she could see that the dust didn't quite lie flat. She brushed it off with her hand, pulling back with a yelp when she bumped something under the layer of dust.

It was a book. She picked it up, blowing off the rest of the dust.

It was very thin, with an unmarked black cover, and in surprisingly good shape. She wondered how long ago it had been abandoned here.

She opened it to a random page. The pages were ruled, the lines filled with shaky cursive writing. She squinted, trying to decipher them. It seemed to be some sort of journal.

 _My head is filled with the Green Man's lies,_ she read. _I don't know what's real anymore. I don't know what I've lost. I don't know what's mine, and what's his._

 _Have I even escaped? Is this me, or is this him? Is all this, the hiding and the fear and the Grimm howling outside, is all of it just one of his sick fantasies? Or am I finally free?_

Ruby went to turn the page, but before she could, a sound broke the perfect silence of the room.

"Greetings," said a quiet voice behind her.

~o~O~o~O~o~

 **Author's Notes:**

 *** Thanks to Appliciousness for beta.**

 *** I'm heading into a very busy period at work. I'm going to try for weekly updates anyway, but it might end up being every two weeks instead.**

 *** The next update will be on either Sunday Oct. 28 or Sun. Nov. 4.**


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